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BLOOM’S LITERARY CRITICISM 20 TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION

NOVELISTS

NOVELS
AND
LITERARY
BLOOM’S CRITICISM 20TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION

Dramatists and Dramas


The Epic
Essayists and Prophets
Novelists and Novels
Poets and Poems
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
BLOOM’S LITERARY CRITICISM 20 TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
NOVELISTS
AND
NOVELS

Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University

®
©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.

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Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be


reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.


10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bloom, Harold.
Novelists and novels / Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s literary criticism 20th anniversary collection)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7910-8227-X (alk. paper) 0-7910-8366-7 (PB)
1. Fiction—History and criticism—Juvenile literature. I. Title.
PN3365.B55 2005
809.3—dc22
2005003269

Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi


Cover illustration by Neil Shapiro
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Table of Contents

N O V E L I S T S
PREFACE
Harold Bloom
xiii

A N D
INTRODUCTION
Harold Bloom
xvii

N O V E L S
Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616)
Don Quixote
1

Daniel DeFoe (1660–1731)


Robinson Crusoe / Moll Flanders
3

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)


Gulliver's Travels
10

Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)


Clarissa
22

Henry Fielding (1707–1754)


Tom Jones
28

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)


Tristram Shandy
33

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771)


Humphry Clinker
38

Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774)


The Vicar of Wakefield / She Stoops to Conquer
43
Fanny Burney (1752–1840)
Evelina
48

Jane Austen (1775–1817)


Pride and Prejudice / Mansfield Park / Emma / Persuasion
51

Stendhal (1783–1842)
The Red and the Black
72

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)


Frankenstein
77

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)


Père Goriot
87

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)


The Scarlet Letter
91

Charles Dickens (1812–1870)


A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations /
David Copperfield / Hard Times / Bleak House
93

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)


Barchester Towers / The Warden
119

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)


Jane Eyre
125

Emily Brontë (1818–1848)


Wuthering Heights
131
George Eliot (1819–1880)
Daniel Deronda / The Mill on the Floss / Silas Marner / Middlemarch
137

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)


Madame Bovary
151

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)


Crime and Punishment / The Brothers Karamazov
155

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)


Anna Karenina
163

Mark Twain (1835–1910)


Huckleberry Finn
169

Émile Zola (1840–1902)


Thérèse Raquin
171

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)


The Mayor of Casterbridge / The Return of the Native /
Tess of the d'Urbervilles / Jude the Obscure
173

Henry James (1843–1916)


The Ambassadors / The Portrait of a Lady
192

Kate Chopin (1851–1904)


The Awakening
204

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)


Lord Jim / Heart of Darkness / Nostromo
210
Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
The Age of Innocence / The Custom of the Country / Ethan Frome
220

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)


Kim
228

Willa Cather (1873–1947)


My Ántonia / A Lost Lady
235

Herman Hesse (1877–1962)


Steppenwolf / Magister Ludi
240

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968)


The Jungle
242

Stephen Crane (1879–1900)


The Red Badge of Courage / Maggie
245

E.M. Forster (1879–1970)


Howards End / A Passage to India
249

Robert Musil (1880–1942)


The Man Without Qualities
259

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)


Mrs. Dalloway / To the Lighthouse
262

James Joyce (1882–1941)


A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
269

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)


The Castle / The Trial
272
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
Sons and Lovers / The Rainbow / Women in Love
294

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)


Arrowsmith / Babbitt
302

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)


Their Eyes Were Watching God
306

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)


The Great Gatsby
311

William Faulkner (1897–1962)


The Sound and the Fury / Sanctuary / Light in August / Absalom, Absalom!
313

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)


The Sun also Rises / A Farewell to Arms / The Old Man and the Sea
327

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)


Lolita
339

André Malraux (1901–1976)


Man's Fate
343

John Steinbeck (1902–1968)


The Grapes of Wrath / Of Mice and Men
347

Nathanael West (1903–1940)


Miss Lonelyhearts
353

George Orwell (1903–1950)


1984 / Animal Farm
363
Graham Greene (1904–1991)
Brighton Rock
372

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989)


All the King's Men
380

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)


Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
387

Richard Wright (1908–1960)


Native Son
393

William Golding (1911–1993)


The Lord of the Flies
399

Albert Camus (1913–1960)


The Stranger / The Plague
401

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986)


The Fixer / The Tenants
408

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914–1994)


The Invisible Man
412

Saul Bellow (1915–)


Herzog
418

Walker Percy (1916–1990)


The Moviegoer
426

Carson McCullers (1917–1967)


The Heart is a Lonely Hunter / The Ballad of the Sad Café
433
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993)
The Enderby Cycle / Nothing Like the Sun
438

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)


The Good Apprentice
445

William Gaddis (1922–1998)


The Recognitions
452

José Saramago (1922–)


The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
455

Norman Mailer (1923–)


Ancient Evenings
476

James Baldwin (1924–1987)


The Fire Next Time / The Price of the Ticket / Go Tell It On the Mountain
482

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)


The Violent Bear It Away
491

Gabriel García Márquez (1928–)


One Hundred Years of Solitude / Love in the Time of Cholera
500

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–)


The Left Hand of Darkness
505

Toni Morrison (1931–)


Sula / The Bluest Eye / Song of Solomon / Beloved
515

Philip Roth (1933–)


The Zuckerman tetralogy / Portnoy's Complaint
524
Cormac McCarthy (1933–)
Blood Meridian / All the Pretty Horses
532

Don DeLillo (1936–)


White Noise / Underworld
540

Thomas Pynchon (1937–)


Gravity's Rainbow
547

Paul Auster (1947–)


The New York Trilogy
557

Amy Tan (1952–)


The Joy Luck Club
559

FURTHER READING 561


INDEX 563
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 588
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
Preface
Harold Bloom

N O V E L S
I BEGAN EDITING ANTHOLOGIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM FOR CHELSEA
House in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical
Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary
of a somewhat Quixotic venture. If asked how many separate books have
been issued in this project, I no longer have a precise answer, since in so
long a span many volumes go out of print, and even whole series have been
discontinued. A rough guess would be more than a thousand individual
anthologies, a perhaps insane panoply to have been collected and intro-
duced by a single critic.
Some of these books have surfaced in unlikely places: hotel rooms in
Bologna and Valencia, Coimbra and Oslo; used-book stalls in Frankfurt
and Nice; on the shelves of writers wherever I have gone. A batch were
sent by me in answer to a request from a university library in Macedonia,
and I have donated some of them, also by request, to a number of prison-
ers serving life sentences in American jails. A thousand books across a score
of years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four I am a
little bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it
has leaped between centuries.
It cannot be said that I have endorsed every critical essay reprinted, as
my editor’s notes have made clear. Yet the books have to be reasonably
reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them
provoking my own enthusiasm. But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully nam-
ing myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.” I accept only three crite-
ria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive
power, wisdom. What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in
less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices
and inequities. The fashionable in literature and criticism always ebbs

xiii
xiv PREFACE

away into Period Pieces. Old, well-made furniture survives as valuable


antiques, which is not the destiny of badly constructed imaginings and ide-
ological exhortings.
Time, which decays and then destroys us, is even more merciless in
obliterating weak novels, poems, dramas, and stories, however virtuous
these may be. Wander into a library and regard the masterpieces of thirty
years ago: a handful of forgotten books have value, but the iniquity of
oblivion has rendered most bestsellers instances of time’s revenges. The
other day a friend and former student told me that the first of the Poets
Laureate of twentieth-century America had been Joseph Auslander, con-
cerning whom even my still retentive memory is vacant. These days, Mrs.
Felecia Hemans is studied and taught by a number of feminist Romantic
scholars. Of the poems of that courageous wisdom, who wrote to support
her brood, I remember only the opening line of “Casabianca” but only
because Mark Twain added one of his very own to form a couplet:

The boy stood on the burning deck


Eating peanuts by the peck.

Nevertheless, I do not seek to affirm the social inutility of literature,


though I admire Oscar Wilde’s grand declaration: “All art is perfectly use-
less.” Shakespeare may well stand here for the largest benign effect of the
highest literature: properly appreciated, it can heal part of the violence that
is built into every society whatsoever. In my own judgment, Walt
Whitman is the central writer yet brought forth by the Americas—North,
Central, South, Caribbean—whether in English, Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Yiddish or other tongues. And Walt Whitman is a healer, a poet-
prophet who discovered his pragmatic vocation by serving as a volunteer,
unpaid wound-dresser and nurse in the Civil War hospitals of Washington,
D.C. To read and properly understand Whitman can be an education in
self-reliance and in the cure of your own consciousness.
The function of literary criticism, as I conceive it in my gathering old
age, is primarily appreciation, in Walter Pater’s sense, which fuses analysis
and evaluation. When Pater spoke of “art for art’s sake’ he included in the
undersong of his declaration what D.H. Lawrence meant by “art for life’s
sake,” Lawrence, the most provocative of post-Whitmanian vitalists, has
now suffered a total eclipse in the higher education of the English-speak-
ing nations. Feminists have outlawed him with their accusations of misog-
yny, and they describe him as desiring women to renounce sexual pleasure.
On this supposed basis, students lose the experience of reading one of the
PREFACE xv

major authors of the twentieth century, at once an unique novelist, story-


teller, poet, critic, and prophet.

An enterprise as vast as Chelsea House Literary Criticism doubtless


reflects both the flaws and the virtues of its editor. Comprehensiveness has
been a goal throughout, and I have (for the most part) attempted to set
aside many of my own literary opinions. I sorrow when the market keeps
an important volume out of print, though I am solaced by the example of
my idol, Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets. The booksellers
(who were both publishers and retailers) chose the poets, and Johnson was
able to say exactly what he thought of each. Who remembers such wor-
thies as Yalden, Sprat, Roscommon, and Stepney? It would be invidious
for me to name the contemporary equivalents, but their name is legion.
I have been more fully educated by this quest for comprehensivness,
which taught me how to write for a larger audience. Literary criticism is
both an individual and communal mode. It has its titans: Johnson,
Coleridge, Lessing, Goethe, Hazlitt, Sainte-Beuve, Pater, Curtius, Valèry,
Frye, Empson, Kenneth Burke are among them. But most of those I
reprint cannot be of that eminence: one makes a heap of all that can be
found. Over a lifetime in reading and teaching one learns so much from
so many that no one can be certain of her or his intellectual debts.
Hundreds of those I have reprinted I never will meet, but they have helped
enlighten me, insofar as I have been capable of learning from a host of
other minds.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
Introduction
Harold Bloom

N O V E L S
1

THE NOVEL BEGAN AS THE UNGRATEFUL CHILD OF PROSE ROMANCE, BUT


romance revenges itself these days with the apparent death of the novel,
and a rebirth (in strange guises) of picaresque. Cervantes mocked and
exorcized the romance form in Don Quixote, but from Mark Twain until
now the influence of Cervantes has reversed direction, with parody and
phantasmagoria, as embodied in the Knight of the Woeful Countenance,
outdoing the realism and naturalism that dominate his career.
This large volume discourses upon some fifty-six novelists and one
hundred (or so) novels, with some essays by James Baldwin and a play by
Oliver Goldsmith inextricably mixed in. Certain huge structures, like
Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s vast narrative have been excluded here, and
located in the volume The Epic in this Anniversary Collection. Melville’s
Moby-Dick inevitably is also placed there.

In brooding upon my memories of these hundred novels, I find myself


setting Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa second only to Don Quixote in aesthet-
ic eminence. I am aware that this judgment will seem eccentric to many,
but I urge them to read the uncut Clarissa, knowing that Dr. Johnson, fore-
most among all literary critics ever, preceded me in such an estimate.
I have a few regrets about some novels missing from this volume, par-
ticularly Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,
which receive intense appreciations in my book, How to Read and Why.

xvii
xviii INTRODUCTION

The revival of romances from Twain on through Kipling and Kafka


achieved a first apotheosis in D.H. Lawrence, now an absurdly neglected
writer, because of a feminist crusade that has largely exiled him from the
academies of the English-speaking world. In the United States, romance
form dominated in the triad of Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and
Hemingway, all strongly influenced by Joseph Conrad.
The Brontës composed their own sub-genre of Northern romance,
which has an echo in Ursula K. Le Guin’s beautiful fantasy, The Left Hand
of Darkness. Though Toni Morrison insists she is related only to black lit-
erary tradition, she fuses romance elements from Faulkner and from
Virginia Woolf into her own highly individual art.
Faulkner’s legacy is extensive and includes such varied figures as
Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel García
Márquez, and Cormac McCarthy. There is a line of descent that moves
from Moby-Dick through Faulkner to McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which for
me stands with Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, Don DeLillo’s Underworld,
and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon as the four grand narratives composed by
living Americans.
This volume, large as it is, cannot pretend to be a history-in-little of
the birth, life, and death of the dominant literary form since Shakespeare
ended his career as a dramatist. Shakespeare’s own influence on the novel
is reflected here from Jane Austen and Stendhal on through Balzac and
Dickens until it culminates in Dostoevsky’s nihilists, and in Hardy’s pas-
toral tragedies, then to renew itself in Woolf and Joyce, Lawrence and
Beckett, Iris Murdoch and the Philip Roth of Sabbath’s Theater.

No one can prophesy the future of the novel, or even if it has a future,
except in the mixed form of belated romances. There are, for me, several
candidates for the great American book, and none of them is exactly a
novel: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, Emerson’s Essays, and
Huckleberry Finn. Doubtless Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady is the
best-made American novel, but it cannot compete with the strongest works
of the American Renaissance.
Though this is indeliberate on my part, almost a third of the novelists
commented upon in this book are women. If there is a single thematic
vision that links together the traditions of the Anglo-American novel, it is
what I would name as the Protestant Will, whose prime novelistic
INTRODUCTION xix

instances are heroines, whether created by women or by men. From


Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe through Austen’s protagonists, and
Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, the line continues unbroken through the
Brontës, Hardy, James and Wharton to culminate in E.M. Forster, Woolf,
and Lawrence. Toni Morrison may be the last exemplar of this tradition,
which exalts the Protestant Will, however secularized, as the heroine’s
right of private judgment, particularly in exchanges of estimate and mutu-
al esteem with male partners. It may be that the Protestant Will and the
novel now are dying together, and that something beyond the revival of an
eccentric romance form is yet to come.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
Miguel de Cervantes
(1547–1616)

N O V E L S
Don Quixote

DON QUIXOTE IS TO THE SPANISH LANGUAGE WHAT SHAKESPEARE IS TO


English, Dante to Italian, and Goethe to German: the glory of that partic-
ular vernacular. There is no similar singular eminence in French: Rabelais,
Montaigne, Molière, and Racine vie with Victor Hugo, Baudelaire,
Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust. Perhaps Cervantes’s masterwork is
the central book of the last half-millennium, since all the greater novelists
are as much Don Quixote’s children as they are Shakespeare’s. As I have
remarked elsewhere, Shakespeare pragmatically teaches us how to talk to
ourselves, while Cervantes instructs us how to talk to one another. Hamlet
scarcely listens to what anyone else says (except it be the Ghost), while
Falstaff so delights himself that Prince Hal can seem merely the best of
resentful students and half-voluntary audiences. But Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza change and mature by listening to one another, and their
friendship is the most persuasive in all of literature.
Don Quixote or Hamlet? Sancho Panza or Falstaff ? The choice
would be difficult. But Hamlet has only Horatio, and Falstaff ends in soli-
tude, dying while playing with flowers and evidently dreaming of the table
promised in Psalm 23, to be prepared for one by God in the midst of one’s
enemies. Don Quixote dies in Sancho’s loving company, with the wise
squire proposing fresh quests to the heroic knight. Perhaps Shakespeare
did invent the ever-growing inner self, compelled to be its own adventure,
as Emily Dickinson (an authentic heir of Shakespeare) proclaimed.
Cervantes, whose life was arduous and darkly solitary, was able to achieve a
miracle that Shakespeare evaded. Where in Shakespeare can we find two
great natures in full communion with each other? Antony and Cleopatra

1
2 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

are giant forms, but they never listen to what anyone else says, including
one another. Lady Macbeth fades out, Lear is most himself addressing the
heavens, while Prospero has no human peer. I fantasize sometimes that
Shakespeare, in eternity, brings together his most vital characters upon one
stage: Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra. But in
this life, he chose otherwise.
The reader needs no better company than Sancho and the Don: to
make a third with them is to be blessed with happiness, yet also to be
favored with self-insight. The Don and Sancho, between them, know all
that there is to know. They know at last exactly who they are, which is
what, finally, they will teach the rest of us.
N O V E L I S T S
Daniel Defoe

A N D
(1660–1731)

N O V E L S
Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of
pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation.
—KARL MARX on Robinson Crusoe

I got so tired of the very colors!


One day I dyed a baby goat bright red
with my red berries, just to see
something a little different.
And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.
—ELIZABETH BISHOP, “Crusoe in England”

HAD KARL MARX WRITTEN ROBINSON CRUSOE, IT WOULD HAVE HAD EVEN
more moral vigor, but at the expense of the image of freedom it still pro-
vides for us. Had Elizabeth Bishop composed it, Defoe’s narrative would
have been enhanced as image and as impulse, but at the expense of its
Puritan plainness, its persuasive search for some evidences of redemption.
Certainly one of Defoe’s novelistic virtues is precisely what Ian Watt and
Martin Price have emphasized it to be: the puzzles of daily moral choice are
omnipresent. Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are human—all-too-
human—and suffer what Calvin and Freud alike regarded as the econom-
ics of the spirit.
Defoe comes so early in the development of the modern novel as a lit-
erary form that there is always a temptation to historicize rather than to
read him. But historicisms old and new are poor substitutes for reading,
and I do not find it useful to place Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders in their
contemporary context when I reread them, as I have just done. Ian Watt
usefully remarked that “Defoe’s heroes ... keep us more fully informed of

3
4 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

their present stocks of money and commodities than any other characters
in fiction.” I suspect that this had more to do with Defoe than with his age,
and that Defoe would have been no less obsessed with economic motives
if he had written in the era of Queen Victoria. He was a hard man who had
led a hard life: raised as a Dissenter in the London of the Great Plague and
the Great Fire; enduring Newgate prison and the pillory in bankrupt mid-
dle age; working as a secret agent and a scandalous journalist until impris-
oned again for debt and treason. Defoe died old and so may be accounted
as a survivor, but he had endured a good share of reality, and his novels
reflect that endurance.
Dr. Johnson once said that only three books ought to have been still
longer than they were: Don Quixote, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson
Crusoe. Defoe has authentic affinities with Bunyan, but there is nothing
quixotic about Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders. All of Defoe’s protago-
nists are pragmatic and prudent, because they have to be; there is no play
in the world as they know it.

Robinson Crusoe

I did not read Robinson Crusoe as a child, and so missed an experience that
continues to be all but universal; it remains a book that cannot fail with
children. Yet, as Dickens observed, it is also “the only instance of an uni-
versally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no
one cry.” Crusoe’s singular tone, his self-baffled affect, does not bother
children, who appear to empathize with a near-perfect solipsist who nev-
ertheless exhibits energy and inventiveness throughout a quarter-century
of solitude. Perhaps Crusoe’s survival argues implicitly against every child’s
fear of dependency and prophesies the longed-for individuality that is still
to come. Or perhaps every child’s loneliness is answered in Crusoe’s
remarkable strength at sustaining solitude.
Though the identification of Defoe with Crusoe is never wholly overt,
the reader senses its prevalence throughout the narrative. Defoe seems to
me the least ironic of writers, and yet Crusoe’s story is informed by an
overwhelming irony. A restless wanderer, driven to travel and adventure by
forces that he (and the reader) cannot comprehend, Crusoe is confined to
an isolation that ought to madden him by turning him towards an unbear-
able inwardness. Yet his sanity prevails, despite his apparent imprisonment.
Defoe had borne much; Newgate and the pillory were nightmare experi-
ences. Crusoe bears more, yet Defoe will not describe his hero’s suffering
as being psychic. As Virginia Woolf noted, Defoe “takes the opposite way
from the psychologist’s—he describes the effect of emotion on the body,
Novelists and Novels 5

not on the mind.” Nowhere is this stronger than in Crusoe’s agony as he


views a shipwreck:

Such certainly was the Case of these Men, of whom I could not so
much as see room to suppose any of them were sav’d; nothing
could make it rational, so much as to wish, or expect that they did
not all perish there; except the Possibility only of their being taken
up by another Ship in Company, and this was but meer Possibility
indeed; for I saw not the least Signal or Appearance of any such
Thing.
I cannot explain by any possible Energy of Words what a
strange longing or hankering of Desires I felt in my Soul upon this
Sight; breaking out sometimes thus; O that there had been but
one or two; nay, or but one Soul sav’d out of this Ship, to have
escap’d to me, that I might but have had one Companion, one
Fellow-Creature to have spoken to me, and to have convers’d
with! In all the Time of my solitary Life, I never felt so earnest, so
strong a Desire after the Society of my Fellow-Creatures, or so
deep a Regret at the want of it.
There are some secret moving Springs in the Affections, which
when they are set a going by some Object in view; or be it some
Object, though not in view, yet rendred present to the Mind by
the Power of Imagination, that Motion carries out the Soul by its
Impetuosity to such violent eager embracings of the Object, that
the Absence of it is insupportable.
Such were these earnest Wishings, That but one Man had been
sav’d! O that it bad been but One! I believe I repeated the Words, 0
that it bad been but One! a thousand Times; and the Desires were
so mov’d by it, that when I spoke the Words, my Hands would
clinch together, and my Fingers press the Palms of my Hands,
that if I had had any soft Thing in my Hand, it would have crusht
it involuntarily; and my Teeth in my Head would strike together,
and set against one another so strong, that for some time I could
not part them again.

These are the reactions of a compulsive craftsman who has found his
freedom but cannot bear its full sublimity. Crusoe, himself the least sub-
lime of personages, is embedded throughout in a sublime situation best
epitomized by the ghastly cannibal feasts he spies upon and from which he
rescues his man Friday. Against his superior technology and Puritan
resolve, the cannibals offer almost no resistance, so that the rapid conversion
6 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

of the cannibal Friday to Protestant theology and diet is not unconvincing.


What may baffle the average rereader is Crusoe’s comparative dearth of
Protestant inwardness. It is not that Marx was accurate and that Crusoe
becomes Protestant only upon the Sabbath, but rather that Defoe’s God is
himself a technocrat and an individualist, not much given to the nicer emo-
tions. Defoe’s God can be visualized as a giant tradesman, coping with the
universe as Crusoe makes do on his island, but with teeming millions of
adoring Fridays where Crusoe enjoys the devotion of just one.

Moll Flanders

With Robinson Crusoe, aesthetic judgment seems redundant; the book’s sta-
tus as popular myth is too permanent, and so the critic must ground arms.
Moll Flanders is another matter and provokes a remarkably wide range of
critical response, from the late poet-critic Allen Tate, who once told me it
was a great novel of Tolstoyan intensity, to equally qualified readers who
deny that it is a novel at all. The overpraisers include James Joyce, who
spoke of “the unforgettable harlot Moll Flanders,” and William Faulkner,
who coupled Moby-Dick and Moll Flanders as works he would like to have
written (together with one of Milne’s Pooh books!). Rereading Moll
Flanders leaves me a touch baffled as I thought it had been better, it being
one of those books that are much more vivid in parts than as a unit so that
the memory holds on to episodes and to impressions, investing them with
an aura that much of the narrative does not possess. The status of the nar-
rative is curiously wavering; one is not always certain one is reading a novel
rather than a colorful tract of the Puritan persuasion. Moll is a formidable
person who sustains our interest and our good will. But the story she tells
seems alternately formed and formless, and frequently confuses the rival
authorities of fiction and supposed fact.
Martin Price notes how little thematic unity Defoe imposes upon the
stuff of existence that constitutes Moll Flanders. As a man who had suffered
Newgate, Defoe gives us only one key indication of his novel’s vision; Moll
was born in Newgate and will do anything to avoid ending there. The
quest for cash is simply her equivalent of Crusoe’s literal quest to survive
physically upon his island, except that Moll is more imaginative than the
strangely compulsive Crusoe. He does only what he must, she does more,
and we begin to see that her obsession has in it an actual taste for adven-
tures. This taste surprises her, but then, as Price observes, she is always
“surprised by herself and with herself.” She learns by what she does, and
almost everything she does is marked by gusto. Her vehemence is her most
winning quality, but most of her qualities are attractive. Male readers are
Novelists and Novels 7

charmed by her, particularly male readers who both exalt and debase
women, among whom Joyce and Faulkner remain the most prominent.
Puritan force, the drive for the soul’s exuberant self-recognition, is as
much exemplified by Moll as by Bunyan’s protagonist. I suspect that was
why William Hazlitt, the greatest literary critic to emerge from the tradi-
tion of Protestant Dissent, had so violent a negative reaction to Moll
Flanders, which otherwise I would have expected him to admire. But, on
some level, he evidently felt that she was a great discredit to Puritan sensi-
bility. Charles Lamb greatly esteemed her and understood how authentic
the Puritan dialectic was in her, pointing to “the intervening flashes of reli-
gious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul” and judging this to
“come near to the tenderness of Bunyan.” Infuriated, Hazlitt responded,
“Mr. Lamb admires Moll Flanders; would he marry Moll Flanders?” to
which the only response a loyal Hazlittian could make is, “Would that
Hazlitt had married a Moll Flanders, and been happy for once in a rela-
tionship with a woman.” All proportion abandoned Hazlitt when he wrote
about Moll Flanders:

We ... may, nevertheless, add, for the satisfaction of the inquisitive


reader, that Moll Flanders is utterly vile and detestable: Mrs.
Flanders was evidently born in sin. The best parts are the account
of her childhood, which is pretty and affecting; the fluctuation of
her feelings between remorse and hardened impenitence in
Newgate; and the incident of her leading off the horse from the
inn-door, though she had no place to put it in after she had stolen
it. This was carrying the love of thieving to an ideal pitch and mak-
ing it perfectly disinterested and mechanical.

Hazlitt did not understand Moll because he could not bear to see the
Puritan impulse displaced into “carrying the love of thieving to an ideal
pitch.” Brilliant as the horse-stealing is, it is surpassed by Moll’s famous
second theft, the episode of the child’s necklace:

I went out now by Day-light, and wandred about I knew not


whither, and in search of I knew not what, when the Devil put a
Snare in my way of a dreadful Nature indeed, and such a one as I
have never had before or since; going thro’ Aldersgate-street there
was a pretty little Child had been at a Dancing School, and was
going home, all alone, and my Prompter, like a true Devil, set me
upon this innocent Creature; I talk’d to it, and it prattl’d to me
again, and I took it by the Hand and led it a long till I came to a
8 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

pav’d Alley that goes into Bartholomew Close, and I led it in there;
the Child said that was not its way home; I said, yes, my Dear it is,
I’ll show you the way home; the Child had a little Necklace on of
Gold Beads, and I had my Eye upon that, and in the dark of the
Alley I stoop’d, pretending to mend the Child’s Clog that was
loose, and took off her Necklace and the Child never felt it, and
so led the Child on again: Here, I say, the Devil put me upon
killing the child in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry; but the
very thought frighted me so that I was ready to drop down, but I
turn’d the Child about and bade it go back again, for that was not
its way home; the Child said so she would, and I went thro’ into
Bartholomew Close, and then turn’d round to another Passage that
goes into Long-lane, so away into Charterhouse-Yard and out into
St. John’s-street, then crossing into Smithfield, went down Chick-
lane and into Field-lane to Holbourn-bridge, when mixing with the
Crowd of People usually passing there, it was not possible to have
been found out; and thus I enterpriz’d my second Sally into the
World.
The thoughts of this Booty put out all the thoughts of the first,
and the Reflections I had made wore quickly off; Poverty, as I have
said, harden’d my Heart, and my own Necessities made me
regardless of any thing: The last Affair left no great Concern upon
me, for as I did the poor Child no harm, I only said to my self, I
had given the Parents a just Reproof for their Negligence in leav-
ing the poor little Lamb to come home by it self, and it would
teach them to take more Care of it another time.
This String of Beads was worth about Twelve or Fourteen
Pounds; I suppose it might have been formerly the Mother’s, for
it was too big for the Child’s wear, but that, perhaps, the Vanity of
the Mother to have her Child look Fine at the Dancing School,
had made her let the Child wear it; and no doubt the Child had a
Maid sent to take care of it, but she, like a careless jade, was taken
up perhaps with some Fellow that had met her by the way, and so
the poor Baby wandred till it fell into my Hands.
However, I did the Child no harm; I did not so much as fright
it, for I had a great many tender Thoughts about me yet, and did
nothing but what, as I may say, meer Necessity drove me to.

The remarkable moment, which horrifies us and must have scandal-


ized Hazlitt, is when Moll says, “the Devil put me upon killing the Child
in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry; but the very thought frighted me
Novelists and Novels 9

so that I was ready to drop down.” We do not believe that Moll will slay
the child, but she frightens us because of her capacity for surprising her-
self. We are reminded that we do not understand Moll, because Defoe does
not understand her. That is his novel’s most peculiar strength and its most
peculiar weakness. Gide’s Lafcadio, contemplating his own crime, mur-
murs that it is not about events that he is curious, but only about himself.
That is in the spirit of Defoe’s Moll. The Protestant sensibility stands back
from itself, and watches the spirits of good and of evil contend for it, with
the detachment of a certain estrangement, a certain wonder at the
immense energies that God has placed in one’s soul.
N O V E L S
A N D

Jonathan Swift
N O V E L I S T S

(1667–1745)

TWICE A YEAR, FOR MANY YEARS NOW, I REREAD SWIFT’S A TALE OF A TUB,
not because I judge it to be the most powerful prose work in the language
(which it is) but because it is good for me, though I dislike this great book
as much as I admire it. A literary critic who is speculative, Gnostic, still
imbued with High Romantic enthusiasm even in his later middle age,
needs to read A Tale of a Tub as often as he can bear to do so. Swift is the
most savage and merciless satirist and ironist in the history of Western lit-
erature, and one of his particularly favorite victims is the critic given to
Gnostic speculations and Romantic enthusiasms.
A Tale of a Tub is a queerly shaped work, by design a parody of the sev-
enteenth-century “anatomy,” as exemplified by Sir Thomas Browne’s
Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Robert Burton’s magnificent The Anatomy of
Melancholy. The most important section of the Tale outrageously is not
even part of the book, but is the attached fragment, A Discourse Concerning
the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. The philosopher Descartes, one of
the leaders of the Bowmen among the Moderns in their confrontation with
the Ancients in Swift’s The Battle of the Books, is the inventor of the dualism
that always will haunt the West, a dualism called “the Ghost in the
Machine” by the analytical philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, and more grimly
named The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit by Jonathan Swift. In The
Battle of the Books, Descartes expiates his radical dualism by dying of an
Aristotelian arrow intended for Bacon:

Then Aristotle observing Bacon advance with a furious Mien, drew


his Bow to the Head, and let fly his Arrow, which mist the valiant
Modern, and went hizzing over his Head; but Des-Cartes it hit; The
Steel Point quickly found a Defect in his Head-piece; it pierced the

10
Novelists and Novels 11

Leather and the Past-board, and went in at his Right Eye. The
Torture of the Pain, whirled the valiant Bow-man round, till Death,
like a Star of superior Influence, drew him into his own Vortex.

Not even the dignity of an heroic death is granted to poor Descartes,


who pays for his cognitive defect and perishes via an anti-Baconian shaft,
swallowed up into a vortex that parodies his own account of perception. Yet
even this poor fate is better than the extraordinarily ferocious drubbing
received by the Cartesian dualism in The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit:

But, if this Plant has found a Root in the Fields of Empire, and of
Knowledge, it has fixt deeper, and spread yet farther upon Holy
Ground. Wherein, though it hath pass’d under the general Name
of Enthusiasm, and perhaps arisen from the same Original, yet
hath it produced certain Branches of a very different Nature, how-
ever often mistaken for each other. The Word in its universal
Acceptation, may be defined, A lifting up of the Soul or its Faculties
above Matter. This Description will hold good in general; but I am
only to understand it, as applied to Religion; wherein there are
three general Ways of ejaculating the Soul, or transporting it
beyond the Sphere of Matter. The first, is the immediate Act of
God, and is called, Prophecy or Inspiration. The second, is the
immediate Act of the Devil, and is termed Possession. The third, is
the Product of natural Causes, the effect of strong imagination,
Spleen, violent Anger, Fear, Grief, Pain, and the like. These three
have been abundantly treated on by Authors, and therefore shall
not employ my Enquiry. But, the fourth Method of Religious
Enthusiasm, or launching out of the Soul, as it is purely an Effect
of Artifice and Mechanick Operation, has been sparingly handled, or
not at all, by any Writer; because tho’ it is an Art of great
Antiquity, yet having been confined to few Persons, it long want-
ed those Advancements and Refinements, which it afterwards met
with, since it has grown so Epidemick, and fallen into so many
cultivating Hands.

All four “methods” reduce the spirit or soul to a gaseous vapor, the
only status possible for any transcendental entity in the cosmos of Hobbes
and Descartes, where the soul must be ejaculated in sublime transport
“beyond the Sphere of Matter.” Within A Tale of a Tub proper, Swift keeps
a very precarious balance indeed as he plays obsessively with the image of
the spirit mechanically operated. So operated, the wretched soul is capable
12 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

of only one mode of movement: digression. What Freud called the drive is
to Swift merely digression. Digression is a turning aside, a kind of walking
in which you never go straight. Digress enough, in discourse or in living,
and you will go mad. A Tale of a Tub is nothing but digression, because
Swift bitterly believes there is nothing else in a Cartesian universe. Spirit
digressing is an oxymoronic operation, and so falls from spirit to gaseous
vapor. Vapor properly moves only by turning aside, by digressing.
Swift’s principal victims, all high priests of digression, he calls “the
Learned Aeolists,” acolytes of the god of the winds, among whom he
counts: “All Pretenders to Inspiration whatsoever.” His savage indignation,
so constant in him as a writer, maintains a consistent fury whenever the
Aeolists are his subject. They are introduced as apocalyptics for whom ori-
gin and end intermix:

The Learned Aeolists, maintain the Original Cause of all Things


to be Wind, from which Principle this whole Universe was at first
produced, and into which it must at last be resolved; that the same
Breath which had kindled, and blew up the Flame of Nature,
should one Day blow it out.

As he is kindled by the Aeolists, Swift’s Tale-teller mounts to an intensi-


ty worthy of his subject, and attains an irony that is itself a kind of hysteria:

It is from this Custom of the Priests, that some Authors maintain


these Aeolists, to have been very antient in the World. Because, the
Delivery of their Mysteries, which I have just now mention’d,
appears exactly the same with that of other antient Oracles, whose
Inspirations were owing to certain subterraneous Effluviums of
Wind, delivered with the same Pain to the Priest, and much about
the same Influence on the People. It is true indeed, that these were
frequently managed and directed by Female Officers, whose
Organs were understood to be better disposed for the Admission
of those Oracular Gusts, as entring and passing up thro’ a
Receptacle of greater Capacity, and causing also a Pruriency by
the Way, such as with due Management; hath been refined from a
Carnal, into a Spiritual Extasie. And to strengthen this profound
Conjecture, it is farther insisted, that this Custom of Female
Priests is kept up still in certain refined Colleges of our Modern
Aeolists, who are agreed to receive their Inspiration, derived thro’
the Receptacle aforesaid, like their Ancestors, the Sibyls.
Novelists and Novels 13

This ends in a passing blow at the Quakers, but its power is danger-
ously close to its horror of becoming what it is working so hard to reject.
Rather like King Lear, the Tale-teller fears the ascent of vapors from
abdomen to head, fears that hysteria, the womb or mother, will unman
him:

O how this mother swells up toward my heart!


Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.—

Swift cannot be, does not want to be, the Tale-teller, but the Tale-
teller may be, in part, Swift’s failed defense against the madness of digres-
sion, and the digressiveness that is madness. Compulsiveness of and in the
Tale-teller becomes a terrifying counter-Sublime of counter-Enthusiasm,
a digressiveness turned against digressiveness, a vapor against vapors:

Besides, there is something Individual in human Minds, that eas-


ily kindles at the accidental Approach and Collision of certain
Circumstances, which tho’ of paltry and mean Appearance, do
often flame out into the greatest Emergencies of Life. For great
Turns are not always given by strong Hands, but by lucky
Adaption, and at proper Seasons; and it is of no import, where the
Fire was kindled, if the Vapor has once got up into the Brain. For
the upper Region of Man, is furnished like the middle Region of the
Air; The Materials are formed from Causes of the widest
Difference, yet produce at last the same Substance and Effect.
Mists arise from the Earth, Steams from Dunghils, Exhalations
from the Sea, and Smoak from Fire; yet all Clouds are the same in
Composition, as well as Consequences: and the Fumes issuing
from a Jakes, will furnish as comely and useful a Vapor, as Incense
from an Altar. Thus far, I suppose, will easily be granted me; and
then it will follow, that as the Face of Nature never produces Rain,
but when it is overcast and disturbed, so Human Understanding,
seated in the Brain, must be troubled and overspread by Vapours,
ascending from the lower Faculties, to water the Invention, and
render it fruitful.

Are these the accents of satire? The passage itself is overcast and dis-
turbed, not so much troubled and overspread by vapors ascending from
below, as it is by the not wholly repressed anxiety that anyone, including the
Tale-teller and Swift, is vulnerable to the Mechanical Operation of the
14 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Spirit. King Henry IV of France (Henry of Navarre), rightly called “the


Great,” is the subject of the next paragraph, which tells of grand prepara-
tions for battle, perhaps to advance “a Scheme for Universal Monarchy,”
until the assassination of Henry IV released the spirit or mighty vapor
from the royal body:

Now, is the Reader exceeding curious to learn, from whence this


Vapour took its Rise, which had so long set the Nations at a Gaze?
What secret Wheel, what hidden Spring could put into Motion so
wonderful an Engine? It was afterwards discovered, that the
Movement of this whole Machine had been directed by an absent
Female, whose Eyes had raised a Protuberancy, and before
Emission, she was removed into an Enemy’s Country. What
should an unhappy Prince do in such ticklish Circumstances as
these?

What indeed? This is genial, and quite relaxed, for Swift, but his sub-
sequent analysis is darker, rhetorically and in moral substance:

Having to no purpose used all peaceable Endeavours, the collect-


ed part of the Semen, raised and enflamed, became adust, convert-
ed to Choler, turned head upon the spinal Duct, and ascended to
the Brain. The very same Principle that influences a Bully to break
the Windows of a Whore, who has jilted him, naturally stirs up a
Great Prince to raise mighty Armies, and dream of nothing but
Sieges, Battles, and Victories.

As a reduction, this continues to have its exuberance, but the phrase,


“raised and enflamed” is at the center, and is yet another Swiftian assault
upon Enthusiasm, another classical irony set against a romantic Sublime.
The Author or Tale-teller forsakes digressiveness to become Swift at his
calmest and most deadly, a transformation itself digressive. Swift cannot be
censured for wanting it every which way, since he is battling not for our
right reason, but for our sanity, and ruggedly he fights for us, against us,
and for himself, against himself.

Gulliver’s Travels

The terrible greatness of A Tale of a Tub has much to do with our sense
of its excess, with its force being so exuberantly beyond its form (or its
calculated formlessness). Gulliver’s Travels, the later and lesser work, has
Novelists and Novels 15

survived for the common reader, whereas Swift’s early masterpiece has not.
Like its descendant, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, A Tale of a Tub demands too
much of the reader, but it more than rewards those demands, and it now
seems unclear whether Sartor Resartus does or not. Gulliver’s first two
voyages are loved by children (of all ages), while the third and fourth voy-
ages, being more clearly by the Swift who wrote A Tale of a Tub, now make
their appeal only to those who would benefit most from an immersion in
the Tub.
Gulliver himself is both the strength and the weakness of the book,
and his character is particularly ambiguous in the great fourth voyage, to
the country of the rational Houyhnhnms and the bestial Yahoos, who are
and are not, respectively, horses and humans. The inability to resist a soci-
etal perspectivism is at once Gulliver’s true weakness, and his curious
strength as an observer. Swift’s barely concealed apprehension that the self
is an abyss, that the ego is a fiction masking our fundamental nothingness,
is exemplified by Gulliver, but on a level of commonplaceness far more
bathetic than anything reductive in the Tale-teller. Poor Gulliver is a good
enough man, but almost devoid of imagination. One way of describing him
might be to name him the least Nietzschean character ever to appear in
any narrative. Though a ceaseless traveler, Gulliver lacks any desire to be
elsewhere, or to be different. His pride is blind, and all too easily magni-
fies to pomposity, or declines to a self-contempt that is more truly a con-
tempt for all other humans. If the Tale-teller is a Swiftian parody of one
side of Swift, the anti-Cartesian, anti-Hobbesian, then Gulliver is a
Swiftian parody of the great ironist’s own misanthropy.
The reader of “A Voyage to Lilliput” is unlikely to forget the fatuity
of Gulliver at the close of chapter 6:

I am here obliged to vindicate the Reputation of an excellent


Lady, who was an innocent Sufferer upon my Account. The
Treasurer took a Fancy to be jealous of his Wife, from the Malice
of some evil Tongues, who informed him that her Grace had taken
a violent Affection for my Person; and the Court-Scandal ran for
some Time that she once came privately to my Lodging. This I
solemnly declare to be a most infamous Falshood, without any
Grounds, farther than that her Grace was pleased to treat me with
all innocent Marks of Freedom and Friendship. I own she came
often to my House, but always publickly ... I should not have dwelt
so long upon this Particular, if it had been a Point wherein the
Reputation of a great Lady is so nearly concerned, to say nothing
of my own; although I had the Honour to be a Nardac, which the
16 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Treasurer himself is not; for all the World knows he is only a


Clumglum, a Title inferior by one Degree, as that of a Marquess is
to a Duke in England; yet I allow he preceded me in right of his
Post.

The great Nardac has so fallen into the societal perspective of Lilliput,
that he sublimely forgets he is twelve times the size of the Clumglum’s vir-
tuous wife, who therefore would have been quite safe with him were they
naked and alone. Escaping back to England, Gulliver has learned nothing
and sets forth on “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,” land of the giants, where he
learns less than nothing:

The Learning of this People is very defective; consisting only in


Morality, History, Poetry and Mathematicks; wherein they must
be allowed to excel. But, the last of these is wholly applied to what
may be useful in Life; to the Improvement of Agriculture and all
mechanical Arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And
as to Ideas, Entities, Abstractions and Transcendentals, I could
never drive the least Conception into their Heads.
No Law of that Country must exceed in Words the Number of
Letters in their Alphabet; which consists only of two and twenty.
But indeed, few of them extend even to that Length. They are
expressed in the most plain and simple Terms, wherein those
People are not Mercurial enough to discover above one
Interpretation. And, to write a Comment upon any Law, is a cap-
ital Crime. As to the Decision of civil Causes, or Proceedings
against Criminals, their Precedents are so few, that they have lit-
tle Reason to boast of any extraordinary Skill in either.

Effective as this is, it seems too weak an irony for Swift, and we are
pleased when the dull Gulliver abandons Brobdingnag behind him. The
Third Voyage, more properly Swiftian, takes us first to Laputa, the float-
ing island, at once a parody of a Platonic academy yet also a kind of science
fiction punishment machine, always ready to crush earthlings who might
assert liberty:

If any Town should engage in Rebellion or Mutiny, fall into vio-


lent Factions, or refuse to pay the usual Tribute; the King hath
two Methods of reducing them to Obedience. The first and the
mildest Course is by keeping the Island hovering over such a
Town, and the Lands about it; whereby he can deprive them of the
Novelists and Novels 17

Benefit of the Sun and the Rain, and consequently afflict the
Inhabitants with Dearth and Diseases. And if the Crime deserve
it, they are at the same time pelted from above with great Stones,
against which they have no Defence, but by creeping into Cellars
or Caves, while the Roofs of their Houses are beaten to Pieces.
But if they still continue obstinate, or offer to raise Insurrections;
he proceeds to the last Remedy, by letting the Island drop direct-
ly upon their Heads, which makes a universal Destruction both of
Houses and Men. However, this is an Extremity to which the
Prince is seldom driven, neither indeed is he willing to put it in
Execution; nor dare his Ministers advise him to an Action, which
as it would render them odious to the People, so it would be a
great Damage to their own Estates that lie all below; for the Island
is the King’s Demesn.

The maddening lack of affect on Gulliver’s part begins to tell upon us


here; the stolid narrator is absurdly inadequate to the grim force of his own
recital, grimmer for us now even than it could have been for the prophet-
ic Swift. Gulliver inexorably and blandly goes on to Lagado, where he
observes the grand Academy of Projectors, Swift’s famous spoof of the
British Royal Society, but here the ironies go curiously flat, and I suspect
we are left with the irony of irony, which wearies because by repetition it
seems to become compulsive. Yet it may be that here, as subsequently with
the immortal but senile and noxious Struldbruggs, the irony of irony is
highly deliberate, in order to prepare Gulliver, and the battered reader, for
the great shock of reversal that lies just ahead in the Country of the
Houyhnhnms, which is also the land of the Yahoos, “a strange Sort of
Animal.”
Critical reactions to Gulliver’s fourth voyage have an astonishing
range, from Thackeray calling its moral “horrible, shameful unmanly, blas-
phemous” to T. S. Eliot regarding it as a grand triumph for the human
spirit. Eliot’s judgment seems to me as odd as Thackeray’s, and presumably
both writers believed that the Yahoos were intended as a just representa-
tion of the natural man, with Thackeray humanistically disagreeing, and
the neo-Christian Eliot all too happy to concur. If that were the proper
reading of Swift, we would have to conclude that the great satirist had
drowned in his own misanthropy, and had suffered the terrible irony, after
just evading the becoming one with his Tale-teller, of joining himself to the
uneducable Gulliver. Fit retribution perhaps, but it is unwise to underesti-
mate the deep cunning of Swift.
Martin Price accurately reminds us that Swift’s attitudes do not
18 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

depend solely upon Christian morals, but stem also from a traditional sec-
ular wisdom. Peace and decency are wholly compatible with Christian
teaching, but are secular virtues as well. Whatever the Yahoos represent,
they are not a vision of secular humanity devoid of divine grace, since they
offend the classical view of man quite as profoundly as they seem to suit an
ascetic horror of our supposedly natural condition.
Clearly, it is the virtues of the Houyhnhnms, and not the squalors of
the Yahoos, that constitute a burden for critics and for common readers. I
myself agree with Price, when he remarks of the Houyhnhnms: “They are
rational horses, neither ideal men nor a satire upon others’ ideals for man.”
Certainly they cannot represent a human rational ideal, since none of us
would wish to lack all impulse, or any imagination whatsoever. Nor do
they seem a plausible satire upon the Deistic vision, a satire worthier of
Blake than of Swift, and in any case contradicted by everything that truly
is admirable about these cognitively advanced horses. A rational horse is a
kind of oxymoron, and Swift’s irony is therefore more difficult than ever to
interpret:

My Master heard me with great Appearances of Uneasiness in his


Countenance; because Doubting or not believing, are so little known
in this Country, that the Inhabitants cannot tell how to behave
themselves under such Circumstances. And I remember in fre-
quent Discourses with my Master concerning the Nature of
Manhood, in other Parts of the World; having Occasion to talk of
Lying, and false Representation, it was with much Difficulty that he
comprehended what I meant; although he had otherwise a most
acute Judgment. For he argued thus; That the Use of Speech was
to make us understand one another, and to receive Information of
Facts; now if any one said the Thing which was not, these Ends were
defeated; because I cannot properly be said to understand him;
and I am so far from receiving information, that he leaves me
worse than in Ignorance; for I am led to believe a Thing Black
when it is White, and Short when it is Long. And these were all the
Notions he had concerning the Faculty of Lying, so perfectly well
understood, and so universally practised among human Creatures.

Are we altogether to admire Gulliver’s Master here, when that noble


Houyhnhnm not only does not know how to react to the human propen-
sity to say the thing which was not, but lacks even the minimal imagination
that might allow him to apprehend the human need for fictions, a “sick-
ness not ignoble,” as Keats observed in The Fall of Hyperion? Since the
Novelists and Novels 19

noble Houyhnhnm finds the notion “that the Yahoos were the only gov-
erning Animals” in Gulliver’s country “altogether past his Conception,”
are we again to admire him for an inability that would make it impossible
for us to read Gulliver’s Travels (or King Lear, for that matter)? The virtues
of Swift’s rational horses would not take us very far, if we imported them
into our condition, but can that really be one of Swift’s meanings? And
what are we to do with Swiftian ironies that are too overt already, and
become aesthetically intolerable if we take up the stance of the sublimely
rational Houyhnhnm?

My Master likewise mentioned another Quality, which his


Servants had discovered in several Yahoos, and to him was wholly
unaccountable. He said, a Fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo, to
retire into a Corner, to lie down and howl, and groan, and spurn
away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, and
wanted neither Food nor Water; nor did the Servants imagine
what could possibly, ail him. And the only Remedy they found was
to set him to hard Work, after which he would infallibly come to
himself. To this I was silent out of Partiality to my own Kind; yet
here I could plainly discover the true Seeds of Spleen, which only
seizeth on the Lazy, the Luxurious, and the Rich; who, if they were
forced to undergo the same Regimen, I would undertake for the
Cure.
His Honour had farther observed, that a Female-Yahoo would
often stand behind a Bank or a Bush, to gaze on the young Males
passing by, and then appear, and hide, using many antick Gestures
and Grimaces; at which time it was observed, that she had a most
offensive Smell; and when any of the Males advanced, would slow-
ly retire, looking often back, and with a counterfeit Shew of Fear,
run off into some convenient Place where she knew the Male
would follow her.

Swift rather dubiously seems to want it every which way at once, so


that the Yahoos both are and are not representations of ourselves, and the
Houyhnhnms are and are not wholly admirable or ideal. Or is it the nature
of irony itself, which must weary us, or finally make us long for a true sub-
lime, even if it should turn out to be grotesque? Fearfully strong writer
that he was, Swift as ironist resembles Kafka far more than say Orwell,
among modern authors. We do not know precisely how to read “In the
Penal Colony” or The Trial, and we certainly do not know exactly how to
interpret Gulliver’s fourth voyage. What most merits’ interpretation in
20 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Kafka is the extraordinary perversity of imagination with which he so


deliberately makes himself uninterpretable. Is Swift a similar problem for
the reader? What is the proper response to the dismaying conclusion of
Gulliver’s Travels?

Having thus answered the only Objection that can be raised


against me as a Traveller; I here take a final Leave of my
Courteous Readers, and return to enjoy my own Speculations in
my little Garden at Redriff; to apply those excellent Lessons of
Virtue which I learned among the Houyhnhnms; to instruct the
Yahoos of my own Family as far as I shall find them docible
Animals; to behold my Figure often in a Glass, and thus if possi-
ble habituate my self by Time to tolerate the Sight of a human
Creature: To lament the Brutality of Houyhnhnms in my own
Country, but always treat their Persons with Respect, for the Sake
of my noble Master, his Family, his Friends, and the whole
Houyhnhnm Race, whom these of ours have the Honour to resem-
ble in all their Lineaments, however their Intellectuals came to
degenerate.
I began last Week to permit my Wife to sit at Dinner with me,
at the Farthest End of a long Table; and to answer (but with the
utmost Brevity) the few Questions I ask her. Yet the Smell of a
Yahoo continuing very offensive, I always keep my Nose well stopt
with Rue, Lavender, or Tobacco-Leaves. And although it be hard
for a Man late in Life to remove old Habits; I am not altogether
out of Hopes in some Time to suffer a Neighbour Yahoo in my
Company, without the Apprehensions I am yet under of his Teeth
or his Claws.

Who are those “Courteous Readers” of whom Gulliver takes his final
leave here? We pity the poor fellow, but we do not so much pity Mrs.
Gulliver as wonder how she can tolerate the insufferable wretch. Yet the
final paragraphs have a continued power that justifies their fame, even as
we continue to see Gulliver as deranged:

My Reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so


difficult, if they would be content with those Vices and Follies
only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least
provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a
Fool, a Lord, a Gamster, a Politician, a Whoremunger, a
Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traytor, or the
Novelists and Novels 21

like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: But, when
I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and
Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures
of my Patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how
such an Animal and such a Vice could tally together. The wise and
virtuous Houyhnhnms, who abound in all Excellencies that can
adorn a rational Creature, have no Name for this Vice in their
Language, whereby they describe the detestable Qualities of their
Yahoos; among which they were not able to distinguish this of
Pride, for want of thoroughly understanding Human Nature, as it
sheweth it self in other Countries, where that Animal presides.
But I, who had more Experience, could plainly observe some
Rudiments of it among the wild Yahoos.
But the Houyhnhnms, who live under the Government of
Reason, are no more proud of the good Qualities they possess,
than I should be for not wanting a Leg or an Arm, which no Man
in his Wits would boast of, although he must be miserable with-
out them. I dwell the longer upon this Subject from the Desire I
have to make the Society of an English Yahoo by any Means not
insupportable; and therefore I here intreat those who have any
Tincture of this absurd Vice, that they will not presume to appear
in my Sight.

What takes precedence here, the palpable hit at the obscenity of false
human pride, or the madness of Gulliver, who thinks he is a Yahoo, longs
to be a Houyhnhnm, and could not bear to be convinced that he is neither?
As in A Tale of a Tub, Swift audaciously plays at the farthest limits of irony,
limits that make satire impossible, because no norm exists to which we
might hope to return.
N O V E L S
A N D

Samuel Richardson
N O V E L I S T S

(1689–1761)

Clarissa

I FIRST READ CLARISSA AS A CORNELL UNDERGRADUATE IN THE LATE 1940S,


under the skilled direction of my teacher, William M. Sale, Jr., a fierce par-
tisan of Richardson and a remarkable critic of fiction. Since I cannot read
a novel other than the way that Sale taught me, it is not surprising that forty
years later I hold on fast to his canonical judgment that Clarissa is the finest
novel in the English language. Rereading it through the years, I find it the
only novel that can rival even Proust, despite Proust’s evident advantages.
The long and astonishing sequence that ends the novel, Clarissa’s protract-
ed death and its aftermath, is clearly at one of the limits of the novel as an
art. I find myself fighting not to weep just before the moment of Clarissa’s
death, but as a critic I submit that these would be cognitive tears, and would
say little about me but much about Richardson’s extraordinary powers of
representation. It remains a mystery that Richardson, with no strong nov-
elistic precursors, should have been able to make Clarissa Harlowe the
most persuasive instance of a kind of secular saint, a strong heroine, in the
entire subsequent history of the Western novel.
Ian Watt, still our best historian of the rise of the novel, emphasizes
that one of Richardson’s major advances upon Defoe was in solving the
problem of plot by centering it upon a single action: courtship between the
sexes. That action necessarily entails Richardson’s other grand innovation:
the novelistic representation of the protagonists’ inwardness, a mode of
mimesis in which Richardson had only the one inevitable precursor,
Shakespeare. If Jan Hendrik van den Berg is right, then historical psychol-
ogy is essentially the study of the growing inner self, from Luther’s “inner
man” (1520) through Shakespeare’s almost fully secularized tragic heroes

22
Novelists and Novels 23

on to Rousseau’s and Wordsworth’s solitary egos confronting, with ecsta-


sy, the estrangement of things in a “sense of nature.” Clarissa (1747–48)
preceded all of Rousseau’s publications, so that while Rousseau could have
had something to tell Richardson about the sentiments and sensibility of
inwardness, he did not teach the first great English novelist about the fic-
tional representation of the inner life.
Whether anyone since has surpassed Richardson in this mimetic mode
seems to me at least doubtful. George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, Henry
James’s Isabel Archer, D.H. Lawrence’s Ursula Brangwen, and even
Virginia Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway, do not take us farther into the por-
trayal of a single consciousness than the original Clarissa brings us, and
perhaps they all of them retreat to some degree from her full inwardness.
Price remarks that “Richardson has transformed highly particularized
characters so that their dense and familiar social setting fades away in the
course of the slow disclosure of consequences.” That transformation, in
Clarissa and to some extent in Lovelace, replaces the social and historical
context with a not less than tragic inwardness. If Clarissa is a saint and a
martyr, then what she bears heroic witness to is not so much supernatural
faith in Christ as it is natural faith in the heroic integrity of her own per-
petually growing inner self.

II

Richardson’s power as a novelist centers in the wildly antithetical and


fiercely ambivalent relationship between Clarissa and Lovelace, who
destroy both themselves and one another in what may be the most equiv-
ocal instance of a mutual passion in all of Western literature. I do not ven-
ture that assertion lightly, but no single love affair in Shakespeare, Tolstoy,
or Proust seems comparable in its strength and complexity to the terrible
agon that consumes Clarissa and Lovelace. We can no more speculate
upon what a marriage between Richardson’s protagonists might have been
than we can visualize a world harmoniously ruled by a perpetually united
Antony and Cleopatra. Lovelace and Clarissa are mighty opposites yet
uncannily complementary, and it is Richardson’s consummate art to have
so created them that they must undo one another.
I begin with Lovelace, if only because his power of being, immense as
it is, finally is eclipsed by the transcendental transformation of the gor-
geously dying Clarissa. But that indeed is a finality; until Clarissa begins to
die, the sheer force of her resistance to Lovelace compels him to become
even more himself. Conversely, Lovelace’s aggression greatly strengthens
Clarissa, though the cost of her confirmation is her life. In the novel’s most
24 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

terrible irony, the slow dying of Clarissa directly causes a steady waning in
Lovelace, a dwindling down from a heroic Satanist to a self-ruined liber-
tine, drowning in remorse and confusion.
A.D. McKillop usefully traced Lovelace’s literary ancestry to the lib-
ertine man-of-fashion in Restoration comedy and to the Herculean hero
of Dryden’s dramas, such as Aureng-Zebe and The Conquest of Granada. This
lineage accounts both for some of Lovelace’s obvious faults and for his few
but authentic virtues: healthy disdain for societal appearances and for false
morality, a curiously wistful longing for true virtue, and a brutal honesty.
But a fusion of a Restoration witty rake and Herculean rhetorician is no
more a match for Clarissa Harlowe than a Jacobean hero-villain would
have been, and part of the novel’s fascination is in watching Lovelace slow-
ly realize that Clarissa is necessarily an apocalyptic defeat for him. The
turning point is not the rape, but a moment late in Letter 266, when
Lovelace suddenly apprehends the dialectical entrapment that he and
Clarissa constitute for one another:

A horrid dear creature!—By my soul, she made me shudder! She


had need, indeed, to talk of her unhappiness, in falling into the
hands of the only man in the world who could have used her as I
have used her! She is the only woman in the world who could have
shocked and disturbed me as she has done—So we are upon a foot
in that respect. And I think I have the worst of it by much. Since
very little has been my joy; very much my trouble: and her pun-
ishment, as she calls it, is over: but when mine will, or what it may
be, who can tell?
Here, only recapitulating (think, then, how I must be affected
at the time), I was forced to leave off, and sing a song to myself. I
aimed at a lively air; but I croaked rather than sung: and fell into
the old dismal thirtieth of January strain. I hemmed up for a
sprightlier note; but it would not do: and at last I ended, like a
malefactor, in a dead psalm melody.
High-ho!—I gape like an unfledged kite in its nest, wanting to
swallow a chicken, bobbed at its mouth by its marauding dam!—
What a devil ails me!—I can neither think nor write!—
Lie down, pen, for a moment!—

The devil that ails him is the beginning of his own end, his falling out-
wards and downwards from his last shreds of a libertine ideology into the
dreadful inner space of his defeat by Clarissa, his enforced realization that
self-willing and self-assertion are permanently over for him. Clarissa, a
Novelists and Novels 25

great Puritan withholder of esteem will not accept him at his own evalua-
tion, and he begins to know that pragmatically they have destroyed one
another. His actual death is a release from the death-in-life he has suffered
since Clarissa’s death:

He was delirious, at times, in the two last hours; and then sever-
al times cried out, Take her away! Take her away! but named
nobody. And sometimes praised some lady (that Clarissa, I sup-
pose, whom he had called upon when he received his death’s
wound) calling her, Sweet Excellence! Divine Creature! Fair
Sufferer!—And once he said, Look down, blessed Spirit, look
down!—And there stopped—his lips however moving.
At nine in the morning, he was seized with convulsions, and
fainted away; and it was a quarter of an hour before he came out
of them.
His few last words I must not omit, as they show an ultimate
composure; which may administer some consolation to his hon-
ourable friends.
Blessed—said he, addressing himself no doubt to Heaven; for his
dying eyes were lifted up—a strong convulsion prevented him for
a few moments saying more—But recovering, he again with great
fervour (lifting up his eyes, and his spread hands) pronounced the
word Blessed—Then, in a seeming ejaculation, he spoke inwardly
so as not to be understood: at last, he distinctly pronounced these
three words,

LET THIS EXPIATE!

And then, his head sinking on his pillow, he expired; at about half
an hour after ten.

Lovelace dies in his own acquired religion, which is the worship of the
blessed Clarissa, whom he personally has converted into something consid-
erably more than a saint or even an angel. Being himself pure will and hav-
ing been conquered by an even purer one, he worships his conqueror as
God. Dying as a Clarissian rather than a Christian, as it were; Lovelace sus-
tains his final pride, a peculiar sense of glory that has gone beyond remorse
and has little left in it of mere love. This is hardly expiation in any moral or
spiritual sense whatsoever, as Richardson on some level must have known,
but is certainly an aesthetic expiation, worthy of Baudelaire or of Proust.
26 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

III

Clarissa, as is radiantly appropriate, ends many trajectories beyond her


lover’s destination. I dissent from the entire critical tradition, from Watt and
Price to my younger contemporaries, that has overemphasized Clarissa’s sup
posed self-deceptions. Dr. Samuel Johnson first noted that Clarissa could
not confront the truth of having fallen in love with Lovelace, but that hard-
ly seems to me a duplicity in her, however unknowing. We cannot choose
whom we are free to love, but Clarissa wars more strongly against every
mode of overdetermination than any comparable character in secular fiction.
What matters to her, and this is her greatness, is that her will cannot be vio-
lated, even by her own affections. She refuses to see herself as anyone’s victim—
whether Lovelace’s, her family’s, or her own turning against the self.
Lovelace becomes a wounded narcissist, and so is aggressive down to
the end. But Clarissa could honestly say, if she wanted to, that it is not her
narcissism but her eros that has been crucified. If Lovelace indeed repre-
sented her desire for what she did not have, and was not in herself, then
her desire died, not so paradoxically, with the violation of her body.
Lovelace becomes still more naturalistic after the rape, but she is trans-
formed into a dualist and begins the process of dying to the body of this
life. The issue has nothing to do with society and little to do with conven-
tional reality. It is an aesthetic issue, the ancient agon of the Sublime mode,
which always seeks to answer the triple question: more? equal to? less
than? She was never less than Lovelace, hoped vainly he could be reformed
into her equal, and knows now that she is far more than he is, and more
indeed than anyone else in her world. At that height of the Sublime, she
can only commence dying.
If her will is to remain inviolate, then its independence and integrity
must be manifested by a death that is anything but a revenge, whether it
be against Lovelace, her family, herself, or even against time. Rather, her
death is the true expiation, which can bring forgiveness upon everyone else
involved, though I surmise that she is more interested in forgiving herself
even as she forgives the bewildered Lovelace. A Puritan saint, as Shaw’s St.
Joan shows, is rather more interested in her own integrity than in anyone
else’s suffering. The cost for Clarissa or for Shaw’s St. Joan is an absolute,
inner isolation, but is that not the essence of Protestantism?
There is nothing like Clarissa’s virtually endless death-scene in all of
literature, and while no one would wish it longer I do not wish it any short-
er. Extraordinary as the actual moment of death is, in Letter 481, the most
characteristic revelation of Clarissa’s apotheosis is in Letter 475:
Novelists and Novels 27

Her breath being very short, she desired another pillow; and hav-
ing two before, this made her in a manner sit up in her bed; and
she spoke then with more distinctness; and seeing us greatly con-
cerned, forgot her own sufferings to comfort us; and a charming
lecture she gave us, though a brief one, upon the happiness of a
timely preparation and upon the hazards of a late repentance,
when the mind, as she observed, was so much weakened, as well as
the body, as to render a poor soul unable to contend with its own
infirmities.
I beseech ye, my good friends, proceeded she, mourn not for
one who mourns not, nor has cause to mourn, for herself. On the
contrary, rejoice with me that all my worldly troubles are so near
their end. Believe me, sirs, that I would not, if I might, choose to
live, although the pleasantest part of my life were to come over
again: and yet eighteen years of it, out of nineteen, have been very
pleasant. To be so much exposed to temptation, and to be so liable
to fail in the trial, who would not rejoice that all her dangers are
over!—All I wished was pardon and blessing from my dear par-
ents. Easy as my departure seems to promise to be, it would have
been still easier had I had that pleasure. BUT GOD ALMIGHTY
WOULD NOT LET ME DEPEND FOR COMFORT UPON ANY BUT HIM-
SELF.

This is certainly the purest Protestantism, and we might still be tempt-


ed to call this pride, particularly since Clarissa reminds us that she is all of
nineteen years old. But we do Clarissa violence to name her total knowl-
edge as a form of pride. The Protestant will by now has been blamed for
practically everything that has gone wrong in our spiritual, intellectual,
economic, and political life, as well as our sexual life, and the United States
is the evening land of Protestantism and so the final stage for the travails
of its will. Clarissa, as she dies, shows us the other side, the glory of the
Protestant will. If God would not let Clarissa depend for comfort upon any
but himself, then he gave her the ultimate accolade of the Protestant will:
to accept esteem only where it chose to bestow esteem, and only on its own
terms.
N O V E L S
A N D

Henry Fielding
N O V E L I S T S

(1707–1754)

MARTIN PRICE REMARKS THAT “FIELDING CAN REWARD HIS HEROES


because they do not seek a reward.” As a critical observation, this is in
Fielding’s own spirit and tells us again what kind of novel Fielding invent-
ed, a comic Odyssey, ancestor of Smollett and Dickens, and of Joyce’s
Ulysses. My teacher Frederick W. Hilles liked to compare Tom Jones to
Ulysses, while acknowledging that Fielding the narrator was neither invisi-
ble nor indifferent. Certainly Fielding was a fabulous artificer, which must
be why he provoked so formidable a critical enemy as Dr. Samuel Johnson,
who loved Alexander Pope while despising the most Popean of all novel-
ists. Johnson vastly preferred Samuel Richardson to Fielding, a preference
I myself share, though without prejudice to Fielding, since Richardson’s
Clarissa seems to me still the strongest novel in the language, surpassing
even Austen’s Emma, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and James’s Portrait of a Lady, all
of them its descendants. Tom Jones founds another line, the rival tradition
that includes Dickens and Joyce, novelists as exuberant as Fielding, and
metaphysically and psychologically more problematic.
Samuel Johnson evidently resented what he took to be Fielding’s sim-
plistic vision, a resentment understandable in a great moralist who believed
that human life was everywhere a condition in which much was to be
endured, and little to be enjoyed. No one can match Johnson as a com-
pelling moralist, but he necessarily undervalued Fielding’s moral shrewd-
ness. The true issue between Richardson and Fielding was in modes of rep-
resentation, in their different views of mimesis. It is as though Richardson
and Fielding split Shakespeare between them, with Richardson absorbing
the Shakespearean power to portray inwardness, and Fielding inheriting
Shakespeare’s uncanny ease in depicting a romance world that becomes
more real than reality.

28
Novelists and Novels 29

Johnson told the protesting Boswell that “there is more knowledge of


the heart in one letter of Richardson’s, than in all Tom Jones.” To Johnson,
the personages in Fielding were “characters of manners,” but in
Richardson they were “characters of nature.” This distinction is at least
critical; one feels that many modern scholars who prefer Fielding to
Richardson do so upon Coleridge’s affective premises: “and how charming,
how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson is like
emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy
day in May.” That has the same persuasiveness as Richardson’s explanation
of why he would not read Tom Jones: “I was told, that it was a rambling
Collection of Waking Dreams, in which Probability was not observed.”
The seven volumes of Clarissa were published throughout the year
from December 1747 through December 1748; Tom Jones came out in
February 1749. Rivalry between the two novels was inevitable, and both
seem to have sold very well. Between them, they established the modern
novel, still the dominant literary form now, after two and a half centuries.
Ian Watt, the definitive chronicler of The Rise of the Novel (1957), probably
achieved the most balanced judgment on Fielding’s crucial strengths and
limitations:

In his effort to infuse the new genre with something of the


Shakespearean virtues Fielding departed too far from formal real-
ism to initiate a viable tradition, but his work serves as a perpetu-
al reminder that if the new genre was to challenge older literary
forms it had to find a way of conveying not only a convincing
impression but a wise assessment of life, an assessment that could
only come from taking a much wider view than Defoe or
Richardson or the affairs of mankind.

Tom Jones

What is Shakespearean about Tom Jones? The violent, daemonic, mindless


energy of Squire Western, or the bodily ego rampant, is certainly part of
the answer. Martin Price calls Western the finest English comic character
after Falstaff, and the judgment seems indisputable. Yet here also a shadow
falls. Falstaff, like his precursor, the Wife of Bath, is a heroic vitalist, rais-
ing vitalism, as she does, to the sublime of wit. Like Falstaff, the Wife is a
great parodist, and a dangerously sophisticated Bible interpreter, as Talbot
Donaldson demonstrates. But Western is energy without mind, and so is
himself a living parody of vitalism. Fielding’s genius nevertheless is so
incarnated in Western that he breaks the limits of representation, and leaps
30 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

out of the novel into that supermimetic domain where Falstaff and the
Wife of Bath join Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Western’s simplicity is
so exuberant and physical that it achieves a new kind of complexity, as in
this astonishing comic reversal:

Western had been long impatient for the Event of this Conference,
and was just now arrived at the Door to listen; when having heard
the last Sentiments of his Daughter’s Heart, he lost all Temper,
and bursting open the Door in a Rage, cried out.—“It is a Lie. It
is a d-n’d Lie. It is all owing to that d-d’d Rascal Juones; and if she
could get at un, she’d ha un any Hour of the Day.” Here Allworthy
interposed, and addressing himself to the Squire with some Anger
in his Look, he said, “Mr. Western, you have not kept your Word
with me. You promised to abstain from all Violence.”—“Why so I
did,” cries Western, “as long as it was possible; but to hear a Wench
telling such confounded Lies.—Zounds! Doth she think if she can
make Vools of other Volk, she can make one of me?—No, no, I
know her better than thee dost.” “I am sorry to tell you, Sir,”
answered Allworthy, “it doth not appear by your Behaviour to this
young Lady, that you know her at all. I ask Pardon for what I say;
but I think our Intimacy, your own Desires, and the Occasion jus-
tify me. She is your Daughter, Mr. Western, and I think she doth
Honour to your Name. If I was capable of Envy, I should sooner
envy you on this Account, than any other Man whatever.”—
“Odrabbit it,” cries the Squire, “I wish she was thine with all my
Heart—wouldst soon be glad to be rid of the Trouble o’ her.”—
“Indeed, my good Friend,” answered Allworthy, “you yourself are
the Cause of all the Trouble you complain of. Place that
Confidence in the young Lady which she so well deserves, and I
am certain you will be the happiest Father on Earth.”—“I
Confidence in her!” cries the Squire.—“’Sblood! what Confidence
can I place in her, when she won’t do as I would ha her? Let her
gi but Consent to marry as I would ha her, and I’ll place as much
Confidence in her as wouldst ha me.”—“You have no Right,
Neighbour,” answered Allworthy, “to insist on any such Consent.
A negative Voice your Daughter allows you, and God and Nature
have thought proper to allow you no more.” “A negative Voice?”
cries the Squire—“Ay! ay! I’ll shew you what a negative Voice I ha.
Go along, go into your Chamber, go, you Stubborn.”—“Indeed,
Mr. Western,” said Allworthy,—“Indeed, you use her cruelly—I
cannot bear to see this—You shall, you must behave to her in a
Novelists and Novels 31

kinder Manner. She deserves the best of Treatment.” “Yes, yes,”


said the Squire, “I know what she deserves: Now she’s gone, I’ll
shew you what she deserves—See here, Sir, here is a Letter from
my Cousin, my Lady Bellaston, in which she is so kind to gi me to
understand, that the Fellow is got out of Prison again; and here
she advises me to take all the Care I can o’ the Wench. Odzookers!
Neighbour Allworthy, you don’t know what it is to govern a
Daughter.”
The Squire ended his Speech with some Compliments to his
own Sagacity; and then Allworthy, after a formal Preface, acquaint-
ed him with the whole Discovery which he had made concerning
Jones, with his Anger to Blifil, and with every Particular which
hath been disclosed to the Reader in the preceding Chapters.
Men over-violent in their Dispositions, are, for the most Part,
as changeable in them. No sooner then was Western informed of
Mr. Allworthy’s Intention to make Jones his Heir, then he joined
heartily with the Uncle in every Commendation of the Nephew,
and became as eager for her Marriage with Jones, as he had before
been to couple her to Blifil.
Here Mr. Allworthy was again forced to interpose, and to relate
what had passed between him and Sophia, at which he testified
great Surprize.
The Squire was silent a Moment, and looked wild with
Astonishment at this Account—At last he cried out, “Why what
can be the Meaning of this, Neighbour Allworthy? Vond o un she
was, that I’ll be sworn to.—Odzookers! I have hit o’t. As sure as a
Gun I have hit o the very right o’t. It’s all along o Zister. The Girl
hath got a Hankering after this son of a Whore of a Lord. I
vound’em together at my Cousin, my Lady Bellaston’s. He hath
turned the Head o’ her that’s certain—but d-n me if he shall ha
her—I’ll ha no Lords nor Courtiers in my Vamily.”

Western is equally passionate, within moments, in swearing that


Sophia shall not have Jones, and that she shall. We are delighted by his
stance, either way, and most delighted at his childish ease in moving from
one position to the other without pause, embarrassment, or reflection. A
passionate infant, Squire Western is sublime on the page, or on the
screen, where as played by Hugh Griffith he ran off with the Osborne-
Richardson Tom Jones; but in mere reality he would be a monster. As a
representation he is triumphant because like the much greater Falstaff he
is free of the superego. We rejoice in Western because he is freedom gone
32 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

wild, including freedom from nasty plotting; yet his mindlessness almost
frightens us.
Price is as accurate as ever when he observes that “Fielding controls
his characters by limiting them,” but Western is the grand exception, being
out of control and extravagant, beyond all limits. No other eighteenth-
century novel could accommodate Western, which is another indication of
the power of Tom Jones. Something primeval in the mode of romance sur-
vives in Western the wild man, who hardly seems to belong to a post-
Swiftian novel that still exalts the Augustan vision. Fielding, like Pope and
Swift, joins the Enlightenment consciousness and ideas of order to an
ongoing sense of the demands of energy. Johnson, who shared with
Fielding the heritage of Pope and Swift, may have felt, obscurely but accu-
rately, that Fielding, like Swift, gave too much away to the daemonic force
of vitalism. “This kind of writing may be termed not improperly the
Comedy of Romance,” Johnson said of Fielding, thus relegating Fielding
to the dark and enchanted ground not yet purified by reason. Johnson
meant to condemn, perhaps, but guides us instead to Fielding’s most sur-
prising strength.
N O V E L I S T S
Laurence Sterne

A N D
(1713–1768)

N O V E L S
Tristram Shandy

STERNE REMARKED, IN A LETTER, THAT TRISTRAM SHANDY “WAS MADE AND


formed to baffle all criticism,” but he probably knew better. Dr. Johnson,
greatest of critics, insisted that Tristram Shandy would not last, a hopeless-
ly wrong prophecy. Sterne gives the critic and reader everything to do, and
can anyone resist, one wonders, a novel in which the hero-narrator declares
(volume 1, chapter 14) that “I have been at it these six weeks, making all the
speed I possibly could,—and am not yet born”? Published in nine short vol-
umes from 1760 to 1767, Tristram Shandy is the masterpiece of what
Northrop Frye has taught us to call the Age of Sensibility, the era of
Rousseau, and of a secularized, vernacular, “Orientalized” Bible, described
by Bishop Lowth (Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 1753) as the
true source of the “language of the passions.” It is also the era of John
Locke, much as we still live in the Age of Sigmund Freud. Johnson, who
also opposed the poetry of Thomas Gray and of his own personal friend,
William Collins, was quite consistent in setting himself against Tristram
Shandy. Henry Fielding may have subverted novelistic forms, but Sterne
subverts the entire Augustan mode of representation and truly ends the cul-
tural enterprise in which Pope had triumphed.
It cannot be accidental that so many of the best contemporary Spanish-
American novels are Shandean, whether or not the particular writer actu-
ally has read Sterne. One such distinguished novelist, when told by me how
grand a fantasist he seemed, amiably assured me that his intentions were
merely realistic. In the presence of extraordinary actuality, Wallace Stevens
observed, consciousness could take the place of imagination. For Sterne,
consciousness itself was the extraordinary actuality, so that sensibility

33
34 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

became one with imagination. Dualism, Cartesian and Lockean, comes to


us now mostly in Freudian guise. “Shandean guise” would do as well, since
Sterne is a thoroughgoing Freudian five generations before Freud. The
fundamental Freudian frontier concepts—the drive, the bodily ego, the
nonrepressive defenses of introjection and projection—are conceptually
exemplified in Tristram Shandy, as is the central Freudian idea or trope of
repression or defense. Most readers of Sterne see this at once, and many of
his critics have reflected upon it. A Freudian exegesis of Tristram Shandy
therefore becomes a redundancy. Far more vital is the question: What is
Sterne trying to do for himself, as a novelist, by his dualistic, solipsistic,
psychological emphasis?
That there is an aesthetic and moral program in the Shandean philos-
ophy, most critics agree, but phrasing it has led to some unfortunate banal-
ities. You can sum up Pope’s or Fielding’s designs upon the reader rather
more easily than you can express Sterne’s. This is not simply a rhetorical
dilemma; Sterne is a great ironist and parodist, but so are Pope and
Fielding, while Swift excels even Sterne in such modes. But if all three of
the great Augustans are cognitively subtle, Sterne is preternaturally subtle,
to the point of being daemonic. Swift is ferocious, yet Sterne is uncanny;
his artistry is indeed diabolic as Martin Price comments, comparing it to
the skill of Ionesco. The spirit of the comparison is right, but Ionesco
hardly can work on Sterne’s scale, which is both vast and minute. I prefer
Richard Lanham’s comparison of Sterne to Chaucer, who also is too wise
to fall into an Arnoldian high seriousness. Like Chaucer and Cervantes,
Sterne is very serious about play, but he is even more playful about form
than they are.

II

What is love, to an almost perfect solipsist? Can it be more than sex?


Is sex all, and does every trembling hand make us squeak, like dolls, the
wished-for word? Sterne is reductive enough to muse on the question, and
to intimate an affirmative answer:

I had escaped, continued the corporal, all that time from falling in
love, and had gone on to the end of the chapter, had it not been
predestined otherwise—there is no resisting our fate.
It was on a Sunday, in the afternoon, as I told your honour—
The old man and his wife had walked out—
Every thing was still and hush as midnight about the house—
There was not so much as a duck or a duckling about the yard—
Novelists and Novels 35

—When the fair Beguine came in to see me.


My wound was then in a fair way of doing well—the inflamma-
tion had been gone off for some time, but it was succeeded with
an itching both above and below my knee, so insufferable, that I
had not shut my eyes the whole night for it.
Let me see it, said she, kneeling down upon the ground paral-
lel to my knee, and laying her hand upon the part below it—It
only wants rubbing a little, said the Beguine; so covering it with the
bed cloaths, she began with the fore-finger of her right-hand to
rub under my knee, guiding her fore-finger backwards and for-
wards by the edge of the flannel which kept on the dressing.
In five or six minutes I felt slightly the end of the second fin-
ger—and presently it was laid flat with the other, and she contin-
ued rubbing in that way round and round for a good while; it then
came into my head, that I should fall in love—I blush’d when I saw
how white a hand she had—I shall never, an’ please your honour,
behold another hand so white whilst I live
—Not in that place: said my uncle Toby—
Though it was the most serious despair in nature to the corpo-
ral—he could not forbear smiling.
The young Beguine, continued the corporal, perceiving it was of
great service to me—from rubbing, for some time, with two fin-
gers—proceeded to rub at length, with three—till by little and lit-
tle she brought down the fourth, and then rubb’d with her whole
hand: I will never say another word, an’ please your honour, upon
hands again—but it was softer than satin—
—Prithee, Trim, commend it as much as thou wilt, said my
uncle Toby, I shall hear thy story with the more delight—The cor-
poral thank’d his master most unfeignedly; but having nothing to
say upon the Beguine’s hand, but the same over again—he pro-
ceeded to the effects of it.
The fair Beguine, said the corporal, continued rubbing with her
whole hand under my knee—till I fear’d her zeal would weary
her—“I would do a thousand times more,” said she, “for the love
of Christ”—In saying which she pass’d her hand across the flan-
nel, to the part above my knee, which I had equally complained of,
and rubb’d it also.
I perceived, then, I was beginning to be in love—
As she continued rub-rub-rubbing—I felt it spread from under
her hand, an’ please your honour, to every part of my frame—The
more she rubb’d, and the longer strokes she took—the more the
36 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

fire kindled in my veins—till at length, by two or three strokes


longer than the rest—my passion rose to the highest pitch—I
seiz’d her hand—
—And then, thou clapped’st it to thy lips, Trim, said my uncle
Toby—and madest a speech.
Whether the corporal’s amour terminated precisely in the way
my uncle Toby described it, is not material; it is enough that it
contain’d in it the essence of all the love-romances which ever
have been wrote since the beginning of the world. (8, 22)

To be in love is to be aroused; no more, no less. Sterne, something


of an invalid, was abnormally sensitive, as W.B.C. Watkins remarked,
“—partly because he was inevitably self-conscious physically to an abnor-
mal degree. He was acutely aware of the very circulation of his blood and
the beating of his heart.” Much of Sterne’s alleged prurience is actually his
heightened vulnerability, cognitive and bodily, to sexual stimuli. The
sense of “Sensibility” in Sterne is fully sexual, and aids us in seeing the
true nature of the cultural term, both morally and aesthetically. A suscep-
tibility to tender feelings, however fine, and whether one’s own or those
of others, becomes objectified as a quality or stance that turns away from
the Stoic and Augustan ideal of reason in affective response. This is
Sensibility or “the Sentimental” ideologically free from either right-wing
celebration of bourgeois morality or left-wing idealization or proletarian
or pastoral natural virtues. Its politics, though Whiggish in origin, diffuse
into a universal and histrionic vision of the force and beauty of the habits
of the heart. Martin Price terms it “a vehement, often defiant assertion of
the value of man’s feelings.” Overtly self-conscious and dramatic, yet
insisting upon its sincerity, the stance of Sensibility is a kind of sexualiza-
tion of all the other effects, as Sterne most clearly knew, showed, and told.
Richard Lanham sums this up when he writes that “For Sterne, we final-
ly become not only insatiable pleasure-seekers but, by our nature, incur-
able poseurs.”
All Shandeans have their favorite episodes, and I am tempted to cite all
of volume 7, throughout which Tristram/Sterne flees from Death by tak-
ing a Sentimental journey through France. One could vote for the story of
Amandus and Amanda, or for the concluding country-dance with Nanette,
two superb moments in volume 7. But, if we are pleasure-seeking poseurs,
we cannot do better than chapter 15 of volume 8, which precedes the
Widow Wadman’s direct attempt to light Uncle Toby at both ends at once,
in the sentry-box:
Novelists and Novels 37

It is a great pity—but ’tis certain from every day’s observation of


man, that he may be set on fire like a candle, at either end—pro-
vided there is a sufficient wick standing out; if there is not—there’s
an end of the affair; and if there is—by lighting it at the bottom,
as the flame in that case has the misfortune generally to put out
itself—there’s an end of the affair again.
For my part, could I always have the ordering of it which way
I would be burnt myself—for I cannot bear the thoughts of being
burnt like a beast—I would oblige a housewife constantly to light
me at the top; for then I should burn down decently to the sock-
et; that is, from my head to my heart, from my heart to my liver,
from my liver to my bowels, and so on by the meseraick veins and
arteries, through all the turns and lateral insertions of the intes-
tines and their tunicles to the blind gut—
—I beseech you, doctor Slop, quoth my uncle Toby, interrupt-
ing him as he mentioned the blind gut, in a discourse with my
father the night my mother was brought to bed of me—I beseech
you, quoth my uncle Toby, to tell me which is the blind gut; for,
old as I am, I vow I do not know to this day where it lies.
The blind gut, answered doctor Slop, lies betwixt the Illion and
Colon—
—In a man? said my father.
—’Tis precisely the same, cried doctor Slop, in a woman—
That’s more than I know; quoth my father. (8, 15)

We confront again Sterne’s marvelous sense of the dualistic perplexi-


ties of human existence. Man is not exactly the Puritan candle of the Lord,
burning with a preternatural will-to-holiness, but a sexual candle altogeth-
er, burning with the natural will-to-live. When Tristram/Sterne asks to be
lit at the top, presumably with cognitive fire, then he asks also to “burn
down decently to the socket.” Sterne’s fierce metaphor rejects the
Cartesian ghost-in-the-machine (Gilbert Ryle’s fine formulation) and
desires instead a conflagration of the mind through the senses. Though he
is perhaps the most satirical of all vitalists, Sterne’s final affinities seem to
be with Rabelais and Blake, visionaries who sought to redeem us through
an improvement in sensual enjoyment.
N O V E L S
A N D

Tobias Smollett
N O V E L I S T S

(1721–1771)

Humphry Clinker

DESPITE THE VIGOR AND HUMOR OF HUMPHRY CLINKER, SMOLLETT IS


currently the most neglected of the major eighteenth-century British nov-
elists. Since he is not of the aesthetic eminence of Richardson, Fielding,
and Sterne, one would not expect him to provoke the intense critical inter-
est that they perpetually sustain. But Humphry Clinker, in my judgment, is
a stronger novel than Defoe’s Moll Flanders or Goldsmith’s The Vicar of
Wakefield, and compares favorably also with Fanny Burney’s Evelina. Since
it is now less read and studied than any of those three, its eclipse perhaps
indicates that something in Smollett is not available to what is dominant in
our current sensibility. The era of Thomas Pynchon, apocalyptic and
beyond the resources of any satiric vision, is not a time for accommodating
Smollett’s rough tumble of an expedition towards a yearned-for health.
Smollett, a surgeon, probably knew he had not long to live even as he
composed Humphry Clinker. Resident in Italy from 1768 on, for his health,
Smollett died there in 1771, just fifty, some three months after Humphry
Clinker was published. The expedition that is the novel, winding from
Wales up through the length of England well into Smollett’s native
Scotland, is the author’s long farewell to life, rendering Britain with a pecu-
liar vividness as he remembers it from abroad.
Why the novel is named for Humphry Clinker rather than its central
figure, Matthew Bramble, who clearly is Smollett’s surrogate, never has
been clear to me, except that Clinker is a representative of the future and
may be Smollett’s wistful introjection of a life he would not survive to know.
Clinker and Bramble rise together from the water, a natural son and the
father he has saved from drowning, and both undergo a change of name

38
Novelists and Novels 39

into the same name: Matthew Loyd. This curious mutual baptism seems to
have been a mythic transference for Smollett, since Matthew Loyd was
Bramble’s former name, and will be his son Humphry Clinker’s future
name. It is as though the slowly dying Smollett required a double vision of
survival: as a Matthew Bramble largely purged of an irascibility close to
madness, and as Humphry Clinker, a kindly and innocent youth restored
to a lost heritage.
I have found that many of my friends and students, generally very
good readers, shy away from Humphry Clinker and from Smollett in gen-
eral, because they are repelled by his mode, which at its strongest tends
toward grotesque farce. The mode by definition is not pleasant, but, like
the much greater Swift, Smollett is a master in this peculiar subgenre. It is
hardly accidental that Thomas Rowlandson illustrated Smollett in the
early 1790s, because there is a profound affinity between the novelist and
the caricaturist. Smollett’s reality, at its most intense, is phantasmagoric,
and there are moments early on in Humphry Clinker when the irritable (and
well-named) Bramble seems close to madness. His speculations on the ori-
gins of the waters at Bath are not less than disgusting, and he is more than
weary of mankind: “My curiosity is quite satisfied: I have done with the sci-
ence of men, and must now endeavour to amuse myself with the novelty of
things.” Everywhere he finds only “food for spleen, and subject for
ridicule.”
Bramble satirizes everything he encounters, and is himself an instance
of the mocker mocked or the satirist satirized. One can cultivate an amused
affection for him, but he is not Don Quixote, and the vivid but unlikable
Lismahago, my favorite character in the book, is no Sancho Panza.
Smollett evidently identifies with Bramble, but we cannot do so, and sure-
ly Smollett intended it that way. We may enjoy farce, but we do not wish
to find ourselves acting in one as we stumble on in our lives. I think of my
favorite farce in the language, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. I have acted on
stage just once in my life, playing Falstaff in an emergency, an amateur
pressed into service, and played the witty knight more or less in the style
of the late, great Zero Mostel playing Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in
Nighttown. The one part I would love to play on stage is Barabas, bloody
Jew of Malta, but in life obviously I would prefer being Falstaff to being
Barabas.
When a novel conducts itself as realistic farce, which is Smollett’s
mode, we are denied the pleasures of introjection and identification. But a
novel is wiser to forsake realism when it moves into farce. Sometimes I
wish, reading Smollett, that he had been able to read the Evelyn Waugh of
Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, because I think that Waugh
40 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

would have been a good influence upon him. But that is to wish Smollett
other than Smollett; one of his strengths is that he drives realistic repre-
sentation almost beyond its proper limits, in order to extend the empire of
farce. Perhaps his own fierce temperament required the extension, for he
was more than a little mad, in this resembling certain elements of tem-
perament in Swift, Sterne, and Dr. Samuel Johnson.
Sterne, in A Sentimental Journey, robustly satirizes Smollett as “the
learned Smelfungus,” who “set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every
object he passed by was discoloured or distorted.” Coming out of the
Pantheon, Smelfungus comments, “’Tis nothing but a huge cock pit,” and
all his travel adventures lead to similar judgments, provoking Sterne to a
good retort: “I’ll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell
it, said I, to your physician.” All of us would rather travel with Sterne than
with Smollett, but reading Smollett remains a uniquely valuable experi-
ence. Let us take him at his most ferociously grotesque, in the account of
the sufferings of Lismahago and the still more unfortunate Murphy at the
horrid hands of the Miami Indians:

By dint of her interrogations, however, we learned, that he and


ensign Murphy had made their escape from the French hospital at
Montreal, and taken to the woods, in hope of reaching some
English settlement; but mistaking their route, they fell in with a
party of Miamis, who carried them away in captivity. The inten-
tion of these Indians was to give one of them as an adopted son to
a venerable sachem, who had lost his own in the course of the war,
and to sacrifice the other according to the custom of the country.
Murphy, as being the younger and handsomer of the two, was
designed to fill the place of the deceased, not only as the son of the
sachem, but as the spouse of a beautiful squaw, to whom his pred-
ecessor had been betrothed; but in passing through the different
whigwhams or villages of the Miamis, poor Murphy was so man-
gled by the women and children, who have the privilege of tor-
turing all prisoners in their passage, that, by the time they arrived
at the place of the sachem’s residence, he was rendered altogether
unfit for the purposes of marriage: it was determined therefore, in
the assembly of the warriors, that ensign Murphy should be
brought to the stake, and that the lady should be given to lieu-
tenant Lismahago, who had likewise received his share of tor-
ments, though they had not produced emasculation.—A joint of
one finger had been cut, or rather sawed off with a rusty knife; one
of his great toes was crushed into a mash betwixt two stones; some
Novelists and Novels 41

of his teeth were drawn, or dug out with a crooked nail; splintered
reeds had been thrust up his nostrils and other tender parts; and
the calves of his legs had been blown up with mines of gunpowder
dug in the flesh with the sharp point of the tomahawk.
The Indians themselves allowed that Murphy died with great
heroism, singing, as his death song, the Drimmendoo, in concert
with Mr. Lismahago, who was present at the solemnity. After the
warriors and the matrons had made a hearty meal upon the mus-
cular flesh which they pared from the victim, and had applied a
great variety of tortures, which he bore without flinching, an old
lady, with a sharp knife, scooped out one of his eyes, and put a
burning coal in the socket. The pain of this operation was so
exquisite that he could not help bellowing, upon which the audi-
ence raised a shout of exultation, and one of the warriors stealing
behind him, gave him the coup de grace with a hatchet.
Lismahago’s bride, the squaw Squinkinacoosta, distinguished
herself on this occasion.—She shewed a great superiority of
genius in the tortures which she contrived and executed with her
own hands.—She vied with the stoutest warrior in eating the flesh
of the sacrifice; and after all the other females were fuddled with
dram-drinking, she was not so intoxicated but that she was able to
play the game of the platter with the conjuring sachem, and after-
wards go through the ceremony of her own wedding, which was
consummated that same evening. The captain had lived very hap-
pily with this accomplished squaw for two years, during which she
bore him a son, who is now the representative of his mother’s
tribe; but, at length, to his unspeakable grief, she had died of a
fever, occasioned by eating too much raw bear, which they had
killed in a hunting excursion.

This is both dreadfully funny and funnily dreadful, and is quite mar-
velous writing, though evidently not to all tastes. If it were written by Mark
Twain, we would know how to take it, but Smollett renders it with a dan-
gerous relish, which makes us a little uncertain, since we do not wish to be
quite as rancid as the learned Smelfungus, or even as the dreadful
Lismahago for that matter. Reading Smollett is sometimes like eating too
much raw bear, but that only acknowledges how authentic and strong his
flavor is.
To have inspired Rowlandson and fostered Charles Dickens (who took
his origins in a blend of Smollett and Ben Jonson) is enough merit for any
one writer. Smollett is to Dickens what Marlowe was to Shakespeare, a
42 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

forerunner so swallowed up by an enormous inheritor that the precursor


sometimes seems a minnow devoured by a whale. But, considered in him-
self, Smollett has something of Marlowe’s eminence. Each carried satirical
farce and subversive melodrama to a new limit, and that too is merit
enough.
N O V E L I S T S
Oliver Goldsmith

A N D
(1730–1774)

N O V E L S
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, VERSATILE AND GRACEFUL IN EVERY GENRE, COMPELS
a critic to speculate upon the disproportion between the writer-as-person
and the writer-as-writer. Some (not all) of the most accomplished writers I
have known have been the most colorless of personalities, or if more vivid
and interesting as people, then they have been remarkably unpleasant or
foolish or merely mawkish. Goldsmith appears to have been a luckless indi-
vidual and even what Freud called a “moral masochist,” a victim of his own
death-drive at the age of forty-four. Indeed, Goldsmith is a fairly classic
instance of many Freudian insights, and both The Vicar of Wakefield and She
Stoops to Conquer sustain immediate illumination when Freudian categories
are applied to them. What Freud termed “the most prevalent form of
degradation in erotic life” is a clear guide to young Marlow’s backwardness
with well-born women, and exuberant aggressivity with inn barmaids, col-
lege bedmakers, and others of whom he remarks: “They are of us you
know.” And the lumpish Tony Lumpkin becomes an even more persuasive
representation when his descent into the company of the alehouse is seen,
again in Freudian guise, as a reaction-formation to his dreadful mother,
Mrs. Hardcastle.
Goldsmith aped Johnson in most things, even to the copying of the
critic’s manner, according to Boswell. Johnson spoke the last word upon his
friend and follower: “If nobody was suffered to abuse poor Goldy but those
who could write as well, he would have few censors.” Yet it is a curious sad-
ness that the best lines in any poem by Goldsmith, the concluding passage
of The Deserted Village, were written by Johnson himself:

That trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay,


As ocean sweeps the laboured mole away;

43
44 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

While self-dependent power can time defy,


As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

An ironical reading might interpret that humanly constructed break-


water, “the laboured mole,” as Goldsmith’s ego, in contrast to Johnsonian
self-dependence, the great critic’s rock-like ego. Still, Goldsmith’s
laboured breakwater has defied time also, though not quite with the mas-
sive Johnsonian force. Goldsmith’s writing survives on its curious grace,
curious both because it resists strict definition and because it extends
across the genres: from the Popean verse of The Traveller, through the
Bunyanesque revision of the Book of Job in the sentimental novel The
Vicar of Wakefield, on to the elegiac pastoralism of The Deserted Village, the
permanently successful stage comedy She Stoops to Conquer, and the urbane
good nature of the posthumously published poem Retaliation, a gentle
satire upon the members of Dr. Johnson’s Club.
The strongest case for Goldsmith was made by William Hazlitt, sec-
ond only to Johnson in my estimate, among all critics in the language:

Goldsmith, both in verse and prose, was one of the most delight-
ful writers in the language.... His ease is quite unconscious.
Everything in him is spontaneous, unstudied, yet elegant, harmo-
nious, graceful, nearly faultless.

A kind of natural or unconscious artist, Goldsmith prevails by disarm-


ing his reader. He seems the least tendentious of all authors, writing as
though he had no design upon us. Even now he has not lost his audience,
although critics sometimes treat his works as period pieces. He is strange-
ly close to popular literature, though he hardly can sustain comparison
with the far more powerful Bunyan. Perhaps he moves us now primarily as
an instance of our continuity with a past that we seem otherwise wholly to
have abandoned.

The Vicar of Wakefield

The canonical status of The Vicar of Wakefield is beyond doubt, though I do


not advise rereading it side by side with Bunyan’s far stronger The Pilgrim’s
Progress as I have just done. But then, Bunyan is so powerful a visionary as
to claim the company of Milton and Blake. Goldsmith gives us a gentle
theodicy in the Vicar, and theodicy is hardly a gentle mode. Henry James,
writing an introduction to the novel in 1900, called it “the spoiled child of
our literature,” a work so amiable that it seemed to him “happy in the
Novelists and Novels 45

manner in which a happy man is happy—a man, say, who has married an
angel or been appointed to a sinecure.”
Like the Book of Job, the Vicar brings a good man, here Dr. Primrose,
into the power of Satan, here Squire Thornhill. Some recent revisionist
readings of the Vicar have attempted to give us a Dr. Primrose who is more
self-righteous than virtuous, more smugly egoistical than innocent. These
seem to me weak misreadings because they overlook Goldsmith’s most sur-
prising revision of the Book of Job. With singular audacity, Goldsmith
makes his Job the narrator. Whatever you have Job do, you ought not to
make him the hero of a first-person narrative. Consider the aesthetic and
spiritual effect that even the opening would then have upon us:

I was a man in the land of Uz, and my name was Job; I was per-
fect and upright, and I feared God, and eschewed evil.

No one proclaims his own virtues without alienating us, and no one
recites his own sufferings without embarrassing us. The opening of The
Vicar of Wakefield is not quite like that of a first-person Book of Job, but it
is problematic enough:

I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and
brought up a large family, did more service than he who contin-
ued single and only talked of population. From this motive, I had
scarce taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of
matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding-gown, not
for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.

At best, poor Primrose sounds a pompous fool; at worst, a bore ram-


pant. Why did Goldsmith take the risk? Was Primrose intended to be a
satiric butt and Burchell a reality instructor? Dickens evidently did not
think so, and something of Primrose got into Mr. Pickwick. Unlike Goethe
and Dickens, we do not find Primrose to be altogether comically lovable.
However, we also ought not to fault him. Perhaps he does represent a sec-
ularization of the figure of Job or a Johnsonian allegory of an education in
true humility, but I suspect that he is primarily Goldsmith’s introjection of
Job. This is not to suggest a composite figure, Job/Primrose-Goldsmith as
it were, but to intimate that Primrose is a loving self-satire on Goldsmith’s
part, or an amiable Jobean parody directed against the feckless writer’s own
penchant for catastrophe.
Goldsmith takes the risk of first-person narration because he knows
that the Vicar Primrose is his own somewhat ironic self-portrait and that
46 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

his personal Jobean tribulations do not exactly achieve sublimity. Yet


Goldsmith, in life, and the Vicar, in the novel, cannot refrain from self-
praise, from a kind of snobbery of virtue, even as they are altogether the
passive victims of fortune. Goldsmith, though an impossible personality,
was a literary genius, but Dr. Primrose is simply not very clever. An unin-
telligent Job startles us, if only by reminding us what a formidable moral
psychologist and reasoner the biblical Job was, so much so that he finally
infuriated John Calvin, his greatest commentator. Calvin, in his sermons
on the Book of Job, is finally provoked to cry out that God would have had
to make new worlds to satisfy Job. No one would say that God would have
had to make new worlds to satisfy Dr. Primrose. Goldsmith himself, I sus-
pect, was about halfway between Job and the Vicar in this regard.

She Stoops to Conquer

The Citizen of the World, The Vicar of Wakefield, and the three major poems
may be the best of Goldsmith, but I myself prefer She Stoops to Conquer. It
has held the stage for more than two hundred years and may well be the
authentic instance of a popular drama in English after Shakespeare.
Though it was intended as a parody upon what Goldsmith called
Sentimental as opposed to Laughing Comedy, we have lost the satire with-
out losing the value of the work. It remains very funny and evidently
always will be funny. Goldsmith did not intend farce, but that is what She
Stoops to Conquer assuredly is: major farce. There is something
Shakespearean about Kate Hardcastle, though to compare her to the
Rosalind of As You Like It is an offence against literary tact, as is any com-
parison of Tony Lumpkin to Puck.
Goldsmith had the literary good sense to keep his farce simple, reduc-
tive, and almost primitive; the portrait of Mrs. Hardcastle has a kind of
unrelenting savagery about it. And Tony Lumpkin’s ordeal-by-fright for her
is not less than sadistic, with a cruelty in which we are compelled to share:

TONY. Never fear me. Here she comes. Vanish. She’s got from the
pond, and draggled up to the waist like a mermaid. Enter Mrs
Hardcastle.
MRS HARDCASTLE. Oh, Tony, I’m killed. Shook. Battered to death.
I shall never survive it. That last jolt that laid us against the
quickset hedge has done my business.
TONY. Alack, mama, it was all your own fault. You would be for
running away by night, without knowing one inch of the way.
MRS HARDCASTLE. I wish we were at home again. I never met so
Novelists and Novels 47

many accidents in so short a journey. Drenched in the mud,


overturned in a ditch, stuck fast in a slough, jolted to a jelly,
and at last to lose our way. Whereabouts do you think we are,
Tony?
TONY. By my guess we should be upon Crack-skull Common,
about forty miles from home.
MRS HARDCASTLE. O lud! O lud! the most notorious spot in all the
country. We only want a robbery to make a complete night
on’t.
TONY. Don’t be afraid, mama, don’t be afraid. Two of the five that
kept here are hanged, and the other three may not find us.
Don’t be afraid. Is that a man that’s galloping behind us? No;
it’s only a tree. Don’t be afraid.
MRS HARDCASTLE. The fright will certainly kill me.
TONY. Do you see anything like a black hat moving behind the
thicket?
MRS HARDCASTLE. O death!
TONY. No, it’s only a cow. Don’t be afraid, mama; don’t be afraid.
MRS HARDCASTLE. As I’m alive, Tony, I see a man coming towards
us. Ah! I’m sure on’t. If he perceives us we are undone.
TONY (aside). Father-in-law, by all that’s unlucky, come to take one
of his night walks. (To her) Ah, it’s a highwayman, with pistols
as long as my arm. A damned ill-looking fellow.
MRS HARDCASTLE. Good heaven defend us! He approaches.
TONY. Do you hide yourself in that thicket, and leave me to man-
age him. If there be any danger I’ll cough and cry, Hem!
When I cough be sure to keep close.
Mrs Hardcastle hides behind a tree in the Back Scene.

To find a comparable savagery, one would have to turn to W.S.


Gilbert. There is a touch of Gilbert to She Stoops to Conquer, if only because
we are already in that cosmos of nonsense that is shadowed by the
Freudian reality principle. Freud, writing on “Humor” in 1928, heard in it
the voice of the super-ego, speaking “kindly words of comfort to the intim-
idated ego.” This does not take us far when we consider Shakespearean
comedy at its most complex, As You Like It or All’s Well That Ends Well. But
it beautifully enlightens us as to Goldsmith’s holiday from the superego in
She Stoops to Conquer. Goldsmith was very uncomfortable as Job, even as
that most amiable and silly of Jobs, Dr. Primrose. But he was supremely
comfortable as Tony Lumpkin, his kindly word of comfort to his own
intimidated ego.
N O V E L S
A N D

Fanny Burney
N O V E L I S T S

(1752–1840)

Evelina

EVELINA OR THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG LADY’S ENTRANCE INTO THE WORLD


(1778) earned the approbation of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who remains in my
judgment, as in that of many others, the best critic in Western literary his-
tory. These days Evelina seems to attract mostly feminist critics, though it
is hardly a precursor of their ideologies and sensibilities. A reader who
knows the novels of Samuel Richardson will recognize immediately how
indebted Fanny Burney was to him, and any reader of Jane Austen will be
interested in Evelina in order to contrast the very different ways in which
Richardson influenced the two women novelists. In itself, Evelina provides
a rather mixed aesthetic experience upon rereading, at least to me. Its
largest strength is in its humor and in Fanny Burney’s quite extraordinary
ear for modes of speech. What is rather disappointing is Evelina herself,
who records the wit and spirits of others, while herself manifesting a steady
goodness that is not ideally suited for fictional representation.
Entrance is indeed the novel’s central metaphor, and Evelina enters the
social world as a kind of lesser Sir Charles Grandison, rather than as a less-
er Clarissa. This is not to say that Evelina’s advent in the book does not
please us. Fanny Burney shrewdly delays, and we do not have direct
acquaintance with Evelina until the lively start of Letter 8:

This house seems to be the house of joy; every face wears a smile,
and a laugh is at every body’s service. It is quite amusing to walk
about and see the general confusion; a room leading to the garden
is fitting up for Captain Mirvan’s study. Lady Howard does not sit
a moment in a place; Miss Mirvan is making caps; every body so

48
Novelists and Novels 49

busy!—such flying from room to room!—so many orders given,


and retracted, and given again! nothing but hurry and perturba-
tion.

Ronald Paulson praises Evelina as a careful balance of the old and the
new, of Smollettian satire and a pre-Austenian ironic sensibility. I am sur-
prised always when Smollett’s effect upon Fanny Burney is judiciously
demonstrated, as it certainly is by Paulson, precisely because Evelina can-
not be visualized as journeying in the superbly irascible company of
Matthew Bramble, whereas one can imagine her in dignified converse with
Sir Charles Grandison. That seems another indication of a trouble in
Evelina as a novel, the trouble alas being Evelina herself. In a world of
roughness and wit, she remains the perpetual anomaly, too good for her
context and too undivided to fascinate her reader. One implicit defense of
Evelina is the polemic of Susan Staves, who views the heroine’s dominant
affect as being one of acute anxiety, since she is frequently in danger of sex-
ual (or quasi-sexual) assault. Staves has a telling and lovely sentence:
“Evelina’s progress through the public places of London is about as tran-
quil as the progress of a fair-haired girl through modern Naples.”
Surrounded by Smollettian characters, the non-Smollettian Evelina must
struggle incessantly to maintain her delicacy. That is clearly the case, and
yet again, this creates a problem for the reader. Delicacy under assault is
very difficult to represent except in a comic mode, since more of our imag-
inative sympathy is given to rambunctiousness than to virtue.
This makes it highly problematic, at least for me, to read Evelina either
as a study in the dynamics of fear or as a chronicle of assault. If I find
Evelina herself a touch too bland in her benignity, nevertheless she seems
to me commendably tough, and rather less traumatized than some feminist
critics take her to be. Historical changes in psychology are very real, and
eighteenth-century men and women (of the same social class) have more
in common with one another than say eighteenth-century women intel-
lectuals have in common with our contemporary feminist critics. Evelina
(and Fanny Burney) are less obsessed by Electra complexes, and less dis-
mayed by female difficulties, than many among us, and a curious kind of
anachronism is too frequently indulged these days.
Like her creator, Fanny Burney, who knew so well how to live in the
forceful literary world of her father’s companions, Evelina is ultimately
stronger and shrewder than any of the men, and nearly all of the women,
in her own universe. They may assault her delicacy, but she outwits them,
and subtly triumphs over them. Her goodness does not exclude the skills
of a grand manipulator. She is an anomaly in her sensibility, but not in her
50 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

admirably poised social sense, and her manifold virtues coexist with an
enigmatic cunning, suitable to the social psychology of her era.
N O V E L I S T S
Jane Austen

A N D
(1775–1817)

N O V E L S
THE ODDEST YET BY NO MEANS INAPT ANALOGY TO JANE AUSTEN’S ART OF
representation is Shakespeare’s—oddest, because she is so careful of limits,
as classical as Ben Jonson in that regard, and Shakespeare transcends all
limits. Austen’s humor, her mode of rhetorical irony, is not particularly
Shakespearean, and yet her precision and accuracy of representation is.
Like Shakespeare, she gives us figures, major and minor, utterly consistent
each in her or his own mode of speech and being, and utterly different from
one another. Her heroines have firm selves, each molded with an individu-
ality that continues to suggest Austen’s reserve of power, her potential for
creating an endless diversity. To recur to the metaphor of oddness, the
highly deliberate limitation of social scale in Austen seems a paradoxical
theater of mind in which so fecund a humanity could be fostered. Irony, the
concern of most critics of Austen, seems more than a trope in her work,
seems indeed to be the condition of her language, yet hardly accounts for
the effect of moral and spiritual power that she so constantly conveys, how-
ever implicitly or obliquely.
Ian Watt, in his permanently useful The Rise of the Novel, portrays
Austen as Fanny Burney’s direct heir in the difficult art of combining the
rival modes of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Like Burney,
Austen is thus seen as following the Richardson of Sir Charles Grandison, in
a “minute presentation of daily life,” while emulating Fielding in “adopting
a more detached attitude to her narrative material, and in evaluating it from
a comic and objective point of view.” Watt goes further when he points out
that Austen tells her stories in a discreet variant of Fielding’s manner “as a
confessed author,” though her ironical juxtapositions are made to appear
not those of “an intrusive author but rather of some august and imperson-
al spirit of social and psychological understanding.”

51
52 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

And yet, as Watt knows, Austen truly is the daughter of Richardson,


and not of Fielding, just as she is the ancestor of George Eliot and Henry
James, rather than of Dickens and Thackeray. Her inwardness is an ironic
revision of Richardson’s extraordinary conversion of English Protestant
sensibility into the figure of Clarissa Harlowe, and her own moral and spir-
itual concerns fuse in the crucial need of her heroines to sustain their indi-
vidual integrities, a need so intense that it compels them to fall into those
errors about life that are necessary for life (to adopt a Nietzschean formu-
lation). In this too they follow, though in a comic register, the pattern of
their tragic precursor, the magnificent but sublimely flawed Clarissa
Harlowe.
Richardson’s Clarissa, perhaps still the longest novel in the language,
seems to me also still the greatest, despite the achievements of Austen,
Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joyce. Austen’s Elizabeth
Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolyn
Harleth, James’s Isabel Archer and Milly Theale—though all these are
Clarissa Harlowe’s direct descendants, they are not proportioned to her
more sublime scale. David Copperfield and Leopold Bloom have her com-
pleteness; indeed Joyce’s Bloom may be the most complete representation
of a human being in all of literature. But they belong to the secular age;
Clarissa Harlowe is poised upon the threshold that leads from the
Protestant religion to a purely secular sainthood.
C.S. Lewis, who read Milton as though that fiercest of Protestant tem-
peraments had been an orthodox Anglican, also seems to have read Jane
Austen by listening for her echoings of the New Testament. Quite explic-
itly, Lewis named Austen as the daughter of Dr. Samuel Johnson, greatest
of literary critics, and rigorous Christian moralist:

I feel ... sure that she is the daughter of Dr. Johnson: she inherits
his commonsense, his morality, even much of his style.

The Johnson of Rasselas and of The Rambler, surely the essential


Johnson, is something of a classical ironist, but we do not read Johnson for
his ironies, or for his dramatic representations of fictive selves. Rather, we
read him as we read Koheleth; he writes wisdom literature. That Jane
Austen is a wise writer is indisputable, but we do not read Pride and
Prejudice as though it were Ecclesiastes. Doubtless, Austen’s religious ideas
were as profound as Samuel Richardson’s were shallow, but Emma and
Clarissa are Protestant novels without being in any way religious. What is
most original about the representation of Clarissa Harlowe is the magnif-
icent intensity of her slowly described dying, which goes on for about the
Novelists and Novels 53

last third of Richardson’s vast novel, in a Puritan ritual that celebrates the
preternatural strength of her will. For that is Richardson’s sublime con-
cern: the self-reliant apotheosis of the Protestant will. What is tragedy in
Clarissa becomes serious or moral comedy in Pride and Prejudice and Emma,
and something just the other side of comedy in Mansfield Park and
Persuasion.

Pride and Prejudice

Rereading Pride and Prejudice gives one a sense of Proustian ballet beauti-
fully working itself through in the novel’s formal centerpiece, the deferred
but progressive mutual enlightenment of Elizabeth and Darcy in regard to
the other’s true nature. “Proper pride” is what they learn to recognize in
one another; propriety scarcely needs definition in that phrase, but pre-
cisely what is the pride that allows amiability to flourish? Whatever it is in
Darcy, to what extent is it an art of the will in Elizabeth Bennet? Consider
the superb scene of Darcy’s first and failed marriage proposal:

While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound of
the doorbell, and her spirits were a little fluttered by the idea of
its being Colonel Fitzwilliam himself, who had once before called
late in the evening, and might now come to inquire particularly
after her. But this idea was soon banished, and her spirits were
very differently affected, when, to her utter amazement, she saw
Mr. Darcy walk into the room. In an hurried manner he immedi-
ately began an inquiry after her health, imputing his visit to a wish
of hearing that she were better. She answered him with cold civil-
ity. He sat down for a few moments, and then getting up, walked
about the room. Elizabeth was surprised, but said not a word.
After a silence of several minutes, he came towards her in an agi-
tated manner, and thus began:
“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be
repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire
and love you.”
Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared,
coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient
encouragement; and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long
felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well; but there were
feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not
more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His
sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family
54 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were


dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he
was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.
In spite of her deeply-rooted dislike, she could not be insensible
to the compliment of such a man’s affection, and though her inten-
tions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for the pain
he was to receive; till, roused to resentment by his subsequent lan-
guage, she lost all compassion in anger. She tried, however, to
compose herself to answer him with patience, when he should have
done. He concluded with representing to her the strength of that
attachment which, in spite of all his endeavours, he had found
impossible to conquer; and with expressing his hope that it would
now be rewarded by her acceptance of his hand. As he said this, she
could easily see that he had no doubt of a favourable answer. He
spoke of apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed
real security. Such a circumstance could only exasperate farther,
and, when he ceased, the colour rose into her cheeks, and she said:
“In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode to
express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however
unequally they may be returned. It is natural that obligation
should be felt, and if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you.
But I cannot—I have never desired your good opinion, and you
have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I am sorry to have
occasioned pain to anyone. It has been most unconsciously done,
however, and I hope will be of short duration. The feelings which,
you tell me, have long prevented the acknowledgment of your
regard, can have little difficulty in overcoming it after this expla-
nation.”
Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his
eyes fixed on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less
resentment than surprise. His complexion became pale with
anger, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature.
He was struggling for the appearance of composure, and would
not open his lips till he believed himself to have attained it. The
pause was to Elizabeth’s feelings dreadful. At length, in a voice of
forced calmness, he said:
“And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of
expecting) I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so lit-
tle endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of small impor-
tance.”
Novelists and Novels 55

Stuart M. Tave believes that both Darcy and Elizabeth become so


changed by one another that their “happiness is deserved by a process of
mortification begun early and ended late,” mortification here being the
wounding of pride. Tave’s learning and insight are impressive, but I favor
the judgment that Elizabeth and Darcy scarcely change, and learn rather
that they complement each other’s not wholly illegitimate pride. They
come to see that their wills are naturally allied, since they have no differ-
ences upon the will. The will to what? Their will, Austen’s, is neither the
will to live nor the will to power. They wish to be esteemed precisely where
they estimate value to be high, and neither can afford to make a funda-
mental error, which is both the anxiety and the comedy of the first pro-
posal scene. Why after all does Darcy allow himself to be eloquent on the
subject of his pride, to the extraordinary extent of conveying “with a
warmth” what Austen grimly names as “his sense of her inferiority”?
As readers, we have learned already that Elizabeth is inferior to no
one, whoever he is. Indeed, I sense as the novel closes (though nearly all
Austen critics, and doubtless Austen herself, would disagree with me) that
Darcy is her inferior, amiable and properly prideful as he is. I do not mean
by this that Elizabeth is a clearer representation of Austenian values than
Darcy ever could be; that is made finely obvious by Austen, and her critics
have developed her ironic apprehension, which is that Elizabeth incarnates
the standard of measurement in her cosmos. There is also a transcendent
strength to Elizabeth’s will that raises her above that cosmos, in a mode
that returns us to Clarissa Harlowe’s transcendence of her society, of
Lovelace, and even of everything in herself that is not the will to a self-
esteem that has also made an accurate estimate of every other will to pride
it ever has encountered.
I am suggesting that Ralph Waldo Emerson (who to me is sacred) was
mistaken when he rejected Austen as a “sterile” upholder of social con-
formities and social ironies, as an author who could not celebrate the soul’s
freedom from societal conventions. Austen’s ultimate irony is that
Elizabeth Bennet is inwardly so free that convention performs for her the
ideal function it cannot perform for us: it liberates her will without tend-
ing to stifle her high individuality. But we ought to be wary of even the
most distinguished of Austen’s moral celebrants, Lionel Trilling, who in
effect defended her against Emerson by seeing Pride and Prejudice as a tri-
umph “of morality as style.” If Emerson wanted to see a touch more
Margaret Fuller in Elizabeth Bennet (sublimely ghastly notion!), Trilling
wanted to forget the Emersonian law of Compensation, which is that noth-
ing is got for nothing:
56 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The relation of Elizabeth Bennet to Darcy is real, is intense, but


it expresses itself as a conflict and reconciliation of styles: a formal
rhetoric, traditional and rigorous, must find a way to accomodate
a female vivacity, which in turn must recognize the principled
demands of the strict male syntax. The high moral import of the
novel lies in the fact that the union of styles is accomplished with-
out injury to either lover.

Yes and no, I would say. Yes, because the wills of both lovers work by
similar dialectics, but also no, because Elizabeth’s will is more intense and
purer, and inevitably must be dimmed by her dwindling into a wife, even
though Darcy may well be the best man that society could offer to her. Her
pride has playfulness in it, a touch even of the Quixotic. Uncannily, she is
both her father’s daughter and Samuel Richardson’s daughter as well. Her
wit is Mr. Bennet’s, refined and elaborated, but her will, and her pride in
her will, returns us to Clarissa’s Puritan passion to maintain the power of
the self to confer esteem, and to accept esteem only in response to its
bestowal.

Mansfield Park

John Locke argues against personifying the will: persons can be free, but
not the will, since the will cannot be constrained, except externally. While
one sleeps, if someone moved one into another room and locked the door,
and there one found a friend one wished to see, still one could not say that
one was free thus to see whom one wished. And yet Locke implies that the
process of association does work as though the will were internally con-
strained. Association, in Locke’s sense, is a blind substitution for reasoning,
yet is within a reasoning process, though also imbued with affect. The
mind, in association, is carried unwillingly from one thought to another, by
accident as it were. Each thought appears, and carries along with it a crowd
of unwanted guests, inhabitants of a room where the thought would rather
be alone. Association, on this view, is what the will most needs to be
defended against.
Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, might be considered a co-descendant,
together with Locke’s association-menaced will, of the English Protestant
emphasis upon the will’s autonomy. Fanny, another precursor of the
Virginia Woolf of A Room of One’s Own, was shrewdly described by Lionel
Trilling as “overtly virtuous and consciously virtuous,” and therefore
almost impossible to like, though Trilling (like Austen) liked Fanny very
much. C.S. Lewis, though an orthodox moralist, thought Fanny insipid:
Novelists and Novels 57

“But into Fanny, Jane Austen, to counterbalance her apparent insignifi-


cance, has put really nothing except rectitude of mind; neither passion, nor
physical courage, nor wit, nor resource.” Nothing, I would say, except the
Protestant will, resisting the powers of association and asserting its very
own persistence, its own sincere intensity, and its own isolate sanctions.
Trilling secularized these as “the sanctions of principle” and saw Mansfield
Park as a novel that “discovers in principle the path to the wholeness of the
self which is peace.” That is movingly said, but secularization, in literature,
is always a failed trope, since the distinction between sacred and secular is
not actually a literary but rather a societal or political distinction. Mansfield
Park is not less Protestant than Paradise Lost, even though Austen, as a
writer, was as much a sect of one as John Milton was.
Fanny Price, like the Lockean will, fights against accident, against the
crowding out of life by associations that are pragmatically insincere not
because they are random, but because they are irrelevant, since whatever is
not the will’s own is irrelevant to it. If Fanny herself is an irony it is as
Austen’s allegory of her own defense against influences, human and liter-
ary, whether in her family circle or in the literary family of Fanny Burney,
Fielding, and Richardson. Stuart Tave shrewdly remarks that: “Mansfield
Park is a novel in which many characters are engaged in trying to establish
influence over the minds and lives of others, often in a contest or struggle
for control.” Fanny, as a will struggling only to be itself, becomes at last the
spiritual center of Mansfield Park precisely because she has never sought
power over any other will. It is the lesson of the Protestant will, whether
in Locke or Austen, Richardson or George Eliot, that the refusal to seek
power over other wills is what opens the inward eye of vision. Such a les-
son, which, we seek in Wordsworth and in Ruskin, is offered more subtly
(though less sublimely) by Austen. Fanny, Austen’s truest surrogate, has a
vision of what Mansfield Park is and ought to be, which means a vision also
of what Sir Thomas Bertram is or ought to be. Her vision is necessarily
moral, but could as truly be called spiritual, or even aesthetic.
Perhaps that is why Fanny is not only redeemed but can redeem oth-
ers. The quietest and most mundane of visionaries, she remains also one of
the firmest: her dedication is to the future of Mansfield Park as the idea of
order it once seemed to her. Jane Austen may not be a Romantic in the
high Shelleyan mode, but Fanny Price has profound affinities with
Wordsworth, so that it is no accident that Mansfield Park is exactly con-
temporary with The Excursion. Wordsworthian continuity, the strength
that carries the past alive into the present, is the program of renovation
that Fanny’s pure will brings to Mansfield Park, and it is a program more
Romantic than Augustan, so that Fanny’s will begins to shade into the
58 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Wordsworthian account of the imagination. Fanny’s exile to Portsmouth is


so painful to her not for reasons turning upon social distinctions, but for
causes related to the quiet that Wordsworth located in the bliss of solitude,
or Virginia Woolf in a room of one’s own:

Such was the home which was to put Mansfield out of her head,
and teach her to think of her cousin Edmund with moderated feel-
ings. On the contrary, she could think of nothing but Mansfield,
its beloved inmates, its happy ways. Everything where she now
was was in full contrast to it. The elegance, propriety, regularity,
harmony, and perhaps, above all, the peace and tranquillity of
Mansfield, were brought to her remembrance every hour of the
day, by the prevalence of everything opposite to them here.
The living in incessant noise was, to a frame and temper deli-
cate and nervous like Fanny’s, an evil which no super-added ele-
gance or harmony could have entirely atoned for. It was the great-
est misery of all. At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised
voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all
proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody
had their due importance; everybody’s feelings were consulted. If
tenderness could be ever supposed wanting, good sense and good
breeding supplied its place; and as to the little irritations, some-
times introduced by Aunt Norris, they were short, they were tri-
fling, they were as a drop of water to the ocean, compared with the
ceaseless tumult of her present abode. Here, everybody was noisy,
every voice was loud (excepting, perhaps, her mother’s, which
resembled the soft monotony of Lady Bertram’s, only worn into
fretfulness). Whatever was wanted was halloo’d for, and the ser-
vants halloo’d out their excuses from the kitchen. The doors were
in constant banging, the stairs were never at rest, nothing was
done without a clatter, nobody sat still, and nobody could com-
mand attention when they spoke.
In a review of the two houses, as they appeared to her before
the end of a week, Fanny was tempted to apply to them Dr.
Johnson’s celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and
say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains,
Portsmouth could have no pleasures.

The citation of Dr. Johnson’s aphorism, though placed here with


superb wit, transcends irony. Austen rather seeks to confirm, however
implicitly, Johnson’s powerful warning, in The Rambler, number 4, against
Novelists and Novels 59

the overwhelming realism of Fielding and Smollett (though their popular


prevalence is merely hinted):

But if the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the


memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without
the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken, that, when the
choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibit-
ed; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be
mischievous or uncertain in its effects.

Fanny Price, rather more than Jane Austen perhaps, really does favor
a Johnsonian aesthetic, in life as in literature. Portsmouth belongs to rep-
resentation as practiced by Smollett, belongs to the cosmos of Roderick
Random. Fanny, in willing to get back to Mansfield Park, and to get
Mansfield Park back to itself, is willing herself also to renovate the world
of her creator, the vision of Jane Austen that is Mansfield Park.

Emma

Sir Walter Scott, reviewing Emma in 1815, rather strangely compared Jane
Austen to the masters of the Flemish school of painting, presumably
because of her precision in representing her characters. The strangeness
results from Scott’s not seeing how English Austen was, though the Scots
perspective may have entered into his estimate. To me, as an American
critic, Emma seems the most English of English novels, and beyond ques-
tion one of the very best. More than Pride and Prejudice, it is Austen’s mas-
terpiece, the largest triumph of her vigorous art. Her least accurate
prophecy as to the fate of her fictions concerned Emma, whose heroine,
she thought, “no one but myself will much like.”
Aside from much else, Emma is immensely likable, because she is so
extraordinarily imaginative, dangerous and misguided as her imagination
frequently must appear to others and finally to herself. On the scale of
being, Emma constitutes an answer to the immemorial questions of the
Sublime: More? Equal to? Or less than? Like Clarissa Harlowe before her,
and the strongest heroines of George Eliot and Henry James after her,
Emma Woodhouse has a heroic will, and like them she risks identifying
her will with her imagination. Socially considered, such identification is
catastrophic, since the Protestant will has a tendency to bestow a ranking
upon other selves, and such ranking may turn out to be a personal phan-
tasmagoria. G. Armour Craig rather finely remarked that: “society in
Emma is not a ladder. It is a web of imputations that link feelings and
60 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

conduct.” Yet Emma herself, expansionist rather than reductionist in tem-


perament, imputes more fiercely and freely than the web can sustain, and
she threatens always, until she is enlightened, to dissolve the societal links,
in and for others, that might allow some stability between feelings and
conduct.
Armour Craig usefully added that: “Emma does not justify its heroine
nor does it deride her.” Rather it treats her with ironic love (not loving
irony). Emma Woodhouse is dear to Jane Austen, because her errors are
profoundly imaginative, and rise from the will’s passion for autonomy of
vision. The splendid Jane Fairfax is easier to admire, but I cannot agree
with Wayne Booth’s awarding the honors to her over Emma, though I
admire the subtle balance of his formulation:

Jane is superior to Emma in most respects except the stroke of


good fortune that made Emma the heroine of the book. In mat-
ters of taste and ability, of head and of heart, she is Emma’s supe-
rior.

Taste, ability, head, and heart are a formidable fourfold; the imagina-
tion and the will, working together, are an even more formidable twofold,
and clearly may have their energies diverted to error and to mischief. Jane
Fairfax is certainly more amiable even than Emma Woodhouse, but she is
considerably less interesting. It is Emma who is meant to charm us, and
who does charm us. Austen is not writing a tragedy of the will, like Paradise
Lost, but a great comedy of the will, and her heroine must incarnate the full
potential of the will, however misused for a time. Having rather too much
her own way is certainly one of Emma’s powers, and she does have a dis-
position to think a little too well of herself. When Austen says that these
were “the real evils indeed of Emma’s situation,” we read “evils” as lightly
as the author will let us, which is lightly enough.
Can we account for the qualities in Emma Woodhouse that make her
worthy of comparison with George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth and Henry
James’s Isabel Archer? The pure comedy of her context seems world
enough for her; she evidently is not the heiress of all the ages. We are per-
suaded, by Austen’s superb craft, that marriage to Mr. Knightley will more
than suffice to fulfill totally the now perfectly amiable Emma. Or are we?
It is James’s genius to suggest that while Osmond’s “beautiful mind” was a
prison of the spirit for Isabel, no proper husband could exist anyway, since
neither Touchett nor Goodwood is exactly a true match for her. Do we,
presumably against Austen’s promptings, not find Mr. Knightley some-
thing of a confinement also, benign and wise though he be?
Novelists and Novels 61

I suspect that the heroine of the Protestant will, from Richardson’s


Clarissa Harlowe through to Virginia Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway, can
never find fit match because wills do not marry. The allegory or tragic
irony of this dilemma is written large in Clarissa, since Lovelace, in
strength of will and splendor of being, actually would have been the true
husband for Clarissa (as he well knows) had he not been a moral squalor.
His death-cry (“Let this expiate!”) expiates nothing, and helps establish the
long tradition of the Anglo-American novel in which the heroines of the
will are fated to suffer either overt calamities or else happy unions with
such good if unexciting men as Mr. Knightley or Will Ladislaw in
Middlemarch. When George Eliot is reduced to having the fascinating
Gwendolen Harleth fall hopelessly in love with the prince of prigs, Daniel
Deronda, we sigh and resign ourselves to the sorrows of fictive overdeter-
mination. Lovelace or Daniel Deronda? I myself do not know a high-spir-
ited woman who would not prefer the first, though not for a husband!
Emma is replete with grand comic epiphanies, of which my favorite
comes in volume 3, chapter 11, when Emma receives the grave shock of
Harriet’s disclosure that Mr. Knightley is the object of Harriet’s hopeful
affections:

When Harriet had closed her evidence, she appealed to her dear
Miss Woodhouse, to say whether she had not good ground for hope.
“I never should have presumed to think of it at first,” said she,
“but for you. You told me to observe him carefully, and let his
behavior be the rule of mine—and so I have. But now I seem to
feel that I may deserve him; and that if he does choose me, it will
not be any thing so very wonderful.”
The bitter feelings occasioned by this speech, the many bitter
feelings, made the utmost exertion necessary on Emma’s side to
enable her to say in reply,
“Harriet, I will only venture to declare, that Mr. Knightley is
the last man in the world, who would intentionally give any
woman the idea of his feeling for her more than he really does.”
Harriet seemed ready to worship her friend for a sentence so
satisfactory; and Emma was only saved from raptures and fond-
ness, which at the moment would have been dreadful penance, by
the sound of her father’s footsteps. He was coming through the
hall. Harriet was too much agitated to encounter him. “She could
not compose herself—Mr. Woodhouse would be alarmed—she
had better go;”—with most ready encouragement from her friend,
therefore, she passed off through another door—and the moment
62 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

she was gone, this was the spontaneous burst of Emma’s feelings:
“Oh God! that I had never seen her!”
The rest of the day, the following night, were hardly enough
for her thoughts.—She was bewildered amidst the confusion of all
that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment
had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of
humiliation to her.—How to understand it all! How to understand
the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living
under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and
heart!—she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room,
she tried the shrubbery—in every place, every posture, she per-
ceived that she had acted most weakly; that she had been imposed
on by others in a most mortifying degree; that she had been
imposing on herself in a degree yet more mortifying; that she was
wretched, and should probably find this day but the beginning of
wretchedness.

The acute aesthetic pleasure of this turns on the counterpoint between


Emma’s spontaneous cry: “Oh God! that I had never seen her!” and the
exquisite comic touch of: “She sat still, she walked about, she tried her own
room, she tried the shrubbery—in every place, every posture, she per-
ceived that she had acted most weakly.” The acute humiliation of the will
could not be better conveyed than by “she tried the shrubbery” and “every
posture.” Endlessly imaginative, Emma must now be compelled to endure
the mortification of reducing herself to the postures and places of those
driven into corners by the collapse of visions that have been exposed as
delusions. Jane Austen, who seems to have identified herself with Emma,
wisely chose to make this moment of ironic reversal a temporary purgato-
ry, rather than an infernal discomfiture.

Persuasion

“Persuasion” is a word derived from the Latin for “advising” or “urging,”


for recommending that it is good to perform or not perform a particular
action. The word goes back to a root meaning “sweet” or “pleasant,” so
that the good of performance or nonperformance has a tang of taste rather
than of moral judgment about it. Jane Austen chose it as the title for her
last completed novel. As a title, it recalls Sense and Sensibility or Pride and
Prejudice rather than Emma or Mansfield Park. We are given not the name
of a person or house and estate, but of an abstraction, a single one in this
case. The title’s primary reference is to the persuasion of its heroine, Anne
Novelists and Novels 63

Elliot, at the age of nineteen, by her godmother, Lady Russell, not to


marry Captain Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer. This was, as it
turns out, very bad advice, and, after eight years, it is mended by Anne and
Captain Wentworth. As with all of Austen’s ironic comedies, matters end
happily for the heroine. And yet each time I finish a rereading of this per-
fect novel, I feel very sad.
This does not appear to be my personal vagary; when I ask my friends
and students about their experience of the book, they frequently mention
a sadness which they also associate with Persuasion, more even than with
Mansfield Park. Anne Elliot, a quietly eloquent being, is a self-reliant char-
acter, in no way forlorn, and her sense of self never falters. It is not her sad-
ness we feel as we conclude the book: it is the novel’s somberness that
impresses us. The sadness enriches what I would call the novel’s canonical
persuasiveness, its way of showing us its extraordinary aesthetic distinction.
Persuasion is among novels what Anne Elliot is among novelistic char-
acters—a strong but subdued outrider. The book and the character are not
colorful or vivacious; Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice and Emma
Woodhouse of Emma have a verve to them that initially seems lacking in
Anne Elliot, which may be what Austen meant when she said that Anne
was “almost too good for me.” Anne is really almost too subtle for us,
though not for Wentworth, who has something of an occult wavelength to
her. Juliet McMaster notes “the kind of oblique communication that con-
stantly goes on between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, where,
though they seldom speak to each other, each constantly understands the
full import of the other’s speech better than their interlocutors do.”
That kind of communication in Persuasion depends upon deep “affec-
tion,” a word that Austen values over “love.” “Affection” between woman
and man, in Austen, is the more profound and lasting emotion. I think it is
not too much to say that Anne Elliot, though subdued, is the creation for
whom Austen herself must have felt the most affection, because she lav-
ished her own gifts upon Anne. Henry James insisted that the novelist
must be a sensibility upon which absolutely nothing is lost; by that test
(clearly a limited one) only Austen, George Eliot, and James himself,
among all those writing in English, would join Stendhal, Flaubert, and
Tolstoy in a rather restricted pantheon. Anne Elliot may well be the one
character in all of prose fiction upon whom nothing is lost, though she is
in no danger of turning into a novelist. The most accurate estimate of
Anne Elliot that I have seen is by Stuart Tave:

Nobody hears Anne, nobody sees her, but it is she who is ever at
the center. It is through her ears, eyes, and mind that we are made
64 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

to care for what is happening. If nobody is much aware of her, she


is very much aware of everyone else and she perceives what is hap-
pening to them when they are ignorant of themselves ... she reads
Wentworth’s mind, with the coming troubles he is causing for
others and himself, before those consequences bring the informa-
tion to him.

The aesthetic dangers attendant upon such a paragon are palpable:


how does a novelist make such a character persuasive? Poldy, in Joyce’s
Ulysses, is overwhelmingly persuasive because he is so complete a person,
which was the largest of Joyce’s intentions. Austen’s ironic mode does not
sanction the representation of completeness: we do not accompany her
characters to the bedroom, the kitchen, the privy. What Austen parodies in
Sense and Sensibility she raises to an apotheosis in Persuasion: the sublimity
of a particular, inwardly isolated sensibility. Anne Elliot is hardly the only
figure in Austen who has an understanding heart. Her difference is in her
almost preternatural acuteness of perception of others and of the self,
which are surely the qualities that most distinguish Austen as a novelist.
Anne Elliot is to Austen’s work what Rosalind of As You Like It is to
Shakespeare’s: the character who almost reaches the mastery of perspective
that can be available only to the novelist or playwright, lest all dramatic
quality be lost from the novel or play. C.L. Barber memorably emphasized
this limitation:

The dramatist tends to show us one thing at a time, and to realize


that one thing, in its moment, to the full; his characters go to
extremes, comical as well as serious; and no character, not even a
Rosalind, is in a position to see all around the play and so be com-
pletely poised, for if this were so the play would cease to be dra-
matic.

I like to turn Barber’s point in the other direction: more even than
Hamlet or Falstaff, or than Elizabeth Bennet, or than Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park, Rosalind and Anne Elliot are almost completely poised,
nearly able to see all around the play and the novel. Their poise cannot
transcend perspectivizing completely, but Rosalind’s wit and Anne’s sensi-
bility, both balanced and free of either excessive aggressivity or defensive-
ness, enable them to share more of their creators’ poise than we ever come
to do.
Austen never loses dramatic intensity; we share Anne’s anxiety con-
cerning Wentworth’s renewed intentions until the novel’s conclusion. But
Novelists and Novels 65

we rely upon Anne as we should rely upon Rosalind; critics would see the
rancidity of Touchstone as clearly as they see the vanity of Jacques if they
placed more confidence in Rosalind’s reactions to everyone else in the play,
as well as to herself. Anne Elliot’s reactions have the same winning author-
ity; we must try to give the weight to her words that is not extended by the
other persons in the novel, except for Wentworth.
Stuart Tave’s point, like Barber’s, is accurate even when turned in the
other direction; Austen’s irony is very Shakespearean. Even the reader
must fall into the initial error of undervaluing Anne Elliot. The wit of
Elizabeth Bennet or of Rosalind is easier to appreciate than Anne Elliot’s
accurate sensibility. The secret of her character combines Austenian irony
with a Wordsworthian sense of deferred hope. Austen has a good measure
of Shakespeare’s unmatched ability to give us persons, both major and
minor, who are each utterly consistent in her or his separate mode of
speech, and yet completely different from one another. Anne Elliot is the
last of Austen’s heroines of what I think we must call the Protestant will,
but in her the will is modified, perhaps perfected, by its descendant, the
Romantic sympathetic imagination, of which Wordsworth, as we have
seen, was the prophet. That is perhaps what helps to make Anne so com-
plex and sensitive a character.
Jane Austen’s earlier heroines, of whom Elizabeth Bennet is the exem-
plar, manifested the Protestant will as direct descendants of Samuel
Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, with Dr. Samuel Johnson hovering nearby
as moral authority. Marxist criticism inevitably views the Protestant will,
even in its literary manifestations, as a mercantile matter, and it has
become fashionable to talk about the socioeconomic realities that Jane
Austen excludes, such as the West Indian slavery that is part of the ultimate
basis for the financial security most of her characters enjoy. But all
achieved literary works are founded upon exclusions, and no one has
demonstrated that increased consciousness of the relation between culture
and imperialism is of the slightest benefit whatsoever in learning to read
Mansfield Park. Persuasion ends with a tribute to the British navy, in which
Wentworth has an honored place. Doubtless Wentworth at sea, ordering
the latest batch of disciplinary floggings, is not as pleasant as Wentworth
on land, gently appreciating the joys of affection with Anne Elliot. But
once again, Austen’s is a great art founded upon exclusions, and the sordid
realities of British sea power are no more relevant to Persuasion than West
Indian bondage is to Mansfield Park. Austen was, however, immensely
interested in the pragmatic and secular consequences of the Protestant
will, and they seem to me a crucial element in helping us appreciate the
heroines of her novels.
66 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Austen’s Shakespearean inwardness, culminating in Anne Elliot, revis-


es the moral intensities of Clarissa Harlowe’s secularized Protestant mar-
tyrdom, her slow dying after being raped by Lovelace. What removes
Clarissa’s will to live is her stronger will to maintain the integrity of her
being. To yield to the repentant Lovelace by marrying him would com-
promise the essence of her being, the exaltation of her violated will. What
is tragedy in Clarissa is converted by Austen into ironic comedy, but the
will’s drive to maintain itself scarcely alters in this conversion. In Persuasion
the emphasis is on a willed exchange of esteems, where both the woman
and the man estimate the value of the other to be high. Obviously outward
considerations of wealth, property, and social standing are crucial elements
here, but so are the inward considerations of common sense, amiability,
culture, wit, and affection. In a way (it pains me to say this, as I am a fierce
Emersonian) Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipated the current Marxist cri-
tique of Austen when he denounced her as a mere conformist who would
not allow her heroines to achieve the soul’s true freedom from societal con-
ventions. But that was to mistake Jane Austen, who understood that the
function of convention was to liberate the will, even if convention’s ten-
dency was to stifle individuality, without which the will was inconsequen-
tial.
Austen’s major heroines—Elizabeth, Emma, Fanny, and Anne—pos-
sess such inward freedom that their individualities cannot be repressed.
Austen’s art as a novelist is not to worry much about the socioeconomic
genesis of that inner freedom, though the anxiety level does rise in
Mansfield Park and Persuasion. In Austen, irony becomes the instrument for
invention, which Dr. Johnson defined as the essence of poetry. A concep-
tion of inward freedom that centers upon a refusal to accept esteem except
from one upon whom one has conferred esteem, is a conception of the
highest degree of irony. The supreme comic scene in all of Austen must be
Elizabeth’s rejection of Darcy’s first marriage proposal, where the ironies
of the dialectic of will and esteem become very nearly outrageous. That
high comedy, which continued in Emma, is somewhat chastened in
Mansfield Park, and then becomes something else, unmistakable but diffi-
cult to name, in Persuasion, where Austen has become so conscious a mas-
ter that she seems to have changed the nature of willing, as though it, too,
could be persuaded to become a rarer, more disinterested act of the self.

No one has suggested that Jane Austen becomes a High Romantic in


Persuasion; her poet remained William Cowper, not Wordsworth, and her
favorite prose writer was always Dr. Johnson. But her severe distrust of
imagination and of “romantic love,” so prevalent in the earlier novels, is
Novelists and Novels 67

not a factor in Persuasion. Anne and Wentworth maintain their affection for
each other throughout eight years of hopeless separation, and each has the
power of imagination to conceive of a triumphant reconciliation. This is
the material for a romance, not for an ironical novel. The ironies of
Persuasion are frequently pungent, but they are almost never directed at
Anne Elliot and only rarely at Captain Wentworth. There is a difficult
relation between Austen’s repression of her characteristic irony about her
protagonists and a certain previously unheard plangency that hovers
throughout Persuasion. Despite Anne’s faith in herself she is very vulnera-
ble to the anxiety, which she never allows herself to express, of an unlived
life, in which the potential loss transcends yet includes sexual unfulfill-
ment. I can recall only one critic, the Australian Ann Molan, who empha-
sizes what Austen strongly implies, that “Anne ... is a passionate woman.
And against her will, her heart keeps asserting its demand for fulfillment.”
Since Anne had refused Wentworth her esteem eight years before, she
feels a necessity to withhold her will, and thus becomes the first Austen
heroine whose will and imagination are antithetical.
Although Austen’s overt affinities remained with the Aristocratic Age,
her authenticity as a writer impelled her, in Persuasion, a long way toward
the burgeoning Democratic Age, or Romanticism, as we used to call it.
There is no civil war within Anne Elliot’s psyche, or within Austen’s; but
there is the emergent sadness of a schism in the self, with memory taking
the side of imagination in an alliance against the will. The almost
Wordsworthian power of memory in both Anne and Wentworth has been
noted by Gene Ruoff. Since Austen was anything but an accidental novel-
ist, we might ask why she chose to found Persuasion upon a mutual nostal-
gia. After all, the rejected Wentworth is even less inclined to will a renewed
affection than Anne is, and yet the fusion of memory and imagination tri-
umphs over his will also. Was this a relaxation of the will in Jane Austen
herself ? Since she returns to her earlier mode in Sanditon, her unfinished
novel begun after Persuasion was completed, it may be that the story of
Anne Elliot was an excursion or indulgence for the novelist. The parallels
between Wordsworth and Persuasion are limited but real. High Romantic
novels in England, whether of the Byronic kind like Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights or of a Wordsworthian sort like Adam Bede, are a dis-
tinctly later development. The ethos of the Austen heroine does not
change in Persuasion, but she is certainly a more problematic being, tinged
with a new sadness concerning life’s limits. It may be that the elegant
pathos Persuasion sometimes courts has a connection to Jane Austen’s own
ill health, her intimations of her early death.
Stuart Tave, comparing Wordsworth and Austen, shrewdly noted that
68 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

both were “poets of marriage” and both also possessed “a sense of duty
understood and deeply felt by those who see the integrity and peace of
their own lives as essentially bound to the lives of others and see the lives
of all in a more than merely social order.” Expanding Tave’s insight, Susan
Morgan pointed to the particular affinity between Austen’s Emma and
Wordsworth’s great “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections
of Earliest Childhood.” The growth of the individual consciousness,
involving both gain and loss for Wordsworth but only gain for Austen, is
the shared subject. Emma’s consciousness certainly does develop, and she
undergoes a quasi-Wordsworthian transformation from the pleasures of
near solipsism to the more difficult pleasures of sympathy for others. Anne
Elliot, far more mature from the beginning, scarcely needs to grow in con-
sciousness. Her long-lamented rejection of Wentworth insulates her
against the destructiveness of hope, which we have seen to be the fright-
ening emphasis of the earlier Wordsworth, particularly in the story of poor
Margaret. Instead of hope, there is a complex of emotions, expressed by
Austen with her customary skill:

How eloquent could Anne Elliot have been,—how eloquent, at


least, were her wishes on the side of early warm attachment, and a
cheerful confidence in futurity, against that over-anxious caution
which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence!—She had
been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as
she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

Here learning romance is wholly retrospective; Anne no longer


regards it as being available to her. And indeed Wentworth returns, still
resentful after eight years, and reflects that Anne’s power with him is gone
forever. The qualities of decision and confidence that make him a superb
naval commander are precisely what he condemns her for lacking. With
almost too meticulous a craft, Austen traces his gradual retreat from this
position, as the power of memory increases its dominance over him and as
he learns that his jilted sense of her as being unable to act is quite mistak-
en. It is a beautiful irony that he needs to undergo a process of self-per-
suasion while Anne waits, without even knowing that she is waiting or that
there is anything that could rekindle her hope. The comedy of this is gen-
tly sad, as the reader waits also, reflecting upon how large a part contin-
gency plays in the matter.
While the pre-Socratics and Freud agree that there are no accidents,
Austen thinks differently. Character is fate for her also, but fate, once acti-
vated, tends to evade character in so overdetermined a social context as
Novelists and Novels 69

Austen’s world. In rereading Persuasion, though I remember the happy


conclusion, I nevertheless feel anxiety as Wentworth and Anne circle away
from each other in spite of themselves. The reader is not totally persuad-
ed of a satisfactory interview until Anne reads Wentworth’s quite agonized
letter to her:

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such


means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half
agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious
feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart
more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a
half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that
his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I
may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never incon-
stant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think
and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have under-
stood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I
have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine.
I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which
overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the
tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.—Too
good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do
believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men.
Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in

“I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or fol-


low your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough
to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or
never.”

I cannot imagine such a letter in Pride and Prejudice, or even in Emma


or Mansfield Park. The perceptive reader might have realized how pas-
sionate Anne was, almost from the start of the novel, but until this there
was no indication of equal passion in Wentworth. His letter, as befits a
naval commander, is badly written and not exactly Austenian, but it is all
the more effective thereby. We come to realize that we have believed in
him until now only because Anne’s love for him provokes our interest.
Austen wisely has declined to make him interesting enough on his own. Yet
part of the book’s effect is to persuade the reader of the reader’s own pow-
ers of discernment and self-persuasion; Anne Elliot is almost too good for
the reader, as she is for Austen herself, but the attentive reader gains the
70 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

confidence to perceive Anne as she should be perceived. The subtlest ele-


ment in this subtlest of novels is the call upon the reader’s own power of
memory to match the persistence and intensity of the yearning that Anne
Elliot is too stoical to express directly.
The yearning hovers throughout the book, coloring Anne’s percep-
tions and our own. Our sense of Anne’s existence becomes identified with
our own consciousness of lost love, however fictive or idealized that may
be. There is an improbability in the successful renewal of a relationship
devastated eight years before which ought to work against the texture of
this most “realistic” of Austen’s novels, but she is very careful to see that it
does not. Like the author, the reader becomes persuaded to wish for Anne
what she still wishes for herself. Ann Molan has the fine observation that
Austen “is most satisfied with Anne when Anne is most dissatisfied with
herself.” The reader is carried along with Austen, and gradually Anne is
also persuaded and catches up with the reader, allowing her yearning a
fuller expression.
Dr. Johnson, in The Rambler 29, on “The folly of anticipating misfor-
tunes,” warned against anxious expectations of any kind, whether fearful or
hopeful:

because the objects both of fear and hope are yet uncertain, so we
ought not to trust the representations of one more than the other,
because they are both equally fallacious; as hope enlarges happi-
ness, fear aggravates calamity. It is generally allowed, that no man
ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that
expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit;
nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as
they were described to him by his own imagination.

This is one of a series of Johnsonian pronouncements against the dan-


gerous prevalence of the imagination, some of which his disciple Austen
had certainly read. If you excluded such representations, on the great crit-
ic’s advice, then Wordsworth could not have written at all, and Austen
could not have written Persuasion. Yet it was a very strange book for her to
write, this master of the highest art of exclusion that we have known in the
Western novel. Any novel by Jane Austen could be called an achieved ellip-
sis, with everything omitted that could disturb her ironic though happy
conclusions. Persuasion remains the least popular of her four canonical nov-
els because it is the strangest, but all her work is increasingly strange as we
approach the end of the Democratic Age that her contemporary
Wordsworth did so much to inaugurate in literature. Poised as she is at the
Novelists and Novels 71

final border of the Aristocratic Age, she shares with Wordsworth an art
dependent upon a split between a waning Protestant will and a newly
active sympathetic imagination, with memory assigned the labor of heal-
ing the divide. If the argument of my book has any validity, Austen will sur-
vive even the bad days ahead of us, because the strangeness of originality
and of an individual vision are our lasting needs, which only literature can
gratify in the Theocratic Age that slouches toward us.
N O V E L S
A N D

Stendhal
N O V E L I S T S

(1783–1842)

The Red and the Black

NIETZSCHE SALUTED STENDHAL AS “THIS STRANGE EPICUREAN AND MAN


of interrogation, the last great psychologist of France.” Yet Stendhal is both
less and more than a psychologist, even in the sense of moral psychologist
intended by Nietzsche. If we are unhappy because we are vain, which seems
true enough, then the insight seems related to the conviction that our sor-
rows come to us because we are restless, and cannot sit at our desks. To
assimilate Stendhal to Pascal would be tasteless, yet to determine the prag-
matic difference between them is a complex labor. Pascal, to me, is the
authentic nihilist; Stendhal is something else. Call that Julien Sorel, who
attracts us without compelling our liking. Or do we like him? Robert M.
Adams coolly concludes that:

Whether you like Julien Sorel, and for what parts of his behavior,
depends, then, in some measure, on who you think you are and
what conspiracies or complicities your imagination allows you to
join, in the course of reading the book.

That may be giving Stendhal the best of it, since the reader’s funda-
mental right, as critic, is to ask the writer “who do you think you are, any-
way?” The reversal is shrewd, whether Stendhal’s or Adams’s, since we do
not expect the author to be quite as aggressive as ourselves. Stendhal
brazenly excels us, and Julien is more his surrogate than many have
allowed. We admire Julien for the range of his imagination, and are a little
estranged by his extraordinary (if intermittent) ability to switch his affec-
tions by acts of will. He is, of course, designedly a little Napoleon, and if

72
Novelists and Novels 73

one is not Hazlitt or Stendhal that may not move one to affection. But the
Napoleonic is only one wave or movement in him, and Stendhal is one of
that myriad of nineteenth-century writers of genius who fracture the self.
A more crucial movement is the Byronic, and here Adams is very percep-
tive indeed, marvelously so:

Most of what we think about Julien depends, of course, on our


judgment of his behavior with the two ladies; and here we come
up against the central paradox of the novel, that (like the ladies)
we don’t really think more highly of our hero the better he
behaves. Quite the contrary. The worse he behaves, the more
painful the sacrifices he requires of them, the more we are
impressed by their determination to love him. Impervious to jeal-
ousy, untouched by his effort to murder her, Mme. de Rênal defies
public scandal, leaves her husband and children, and comes to be
with Julien in the hour of his anguish. Mathilde is in despair that
he no longer loves her though she has sacrificed even more prodi-
gally to her love of him. The revelation of Julien is not to be made
directly, in the glare of open daylight, but only through the glow
reflected on the faces of these devoted acolytes. As with Christ and
Dionysus, the mystery of Julien is performed in the darkness of a
prison-tomb, and his resurrection is celebrated in the presence of
women. The cenacle of Julien allures its converts by withdrawing
its mystery, etherealizing its cult: that is the work of the book’s last
important section.

One could argue that Julien, like Lord Byron, has that cool passivity
which provokes his women into a return to themselves, so that his function
is to spur these remarkable (and very dissimilar) ladies on to the epiphanies
of their own modes of heroism. This could account for what I myself find
most unsatisfactory about The Red and the Black, which is the obscurity
(perhaps even obscuratism?) of Julien’s final state of the soul:

The bad air of the prison cell was becoming insupportable to


Julien. Fortunately on the day set for his execution a bright sun
was shining upon the earth, and Julien was in the vein of courage.
To walk in the open air was for him a delicious experience, as
treading the solid ground is for a sailor who has been long at sea.
There now, things are going very well, he told himself, I shall have
no lack of courage.
Never had that head been so poetic as at the moment when it
74 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

was about to fall. The sweetest moments he had ever known in the
woods at Vergy came crowding back into his mind, and with
immense vividness.
Everything proceeded simply, decently, and without the slight-
est affectation on his part.
Two days before he had told Fouqué:
—As for emotion, I can’t quite answer; this dungeon is so ugly
and damp it gives me Feverish moments in which I don’t recog-
nize myself, but fear is another matter, I shall never be seen to
grow pale.
He had made arrangements in advance that on the last day
Fouqué should take away Mathilde and Mme. de Rênal.
—Put them in the same coach, he told him. Keep the post hors-
es at a steady gallop. Either they will fall in one another’s arms or
they will fall into mortal hatred. In either case, the poor women
will be somewhat distracted from their terrible grief. Julien had
forced from Mme. de Rênal an oath that she would live to look
after Mathilde’s son.
—Who knows? Perhaps we retain some consciousness after
death, he said one day to Fouqué. I should like to rest, since rest
is the word, in that little cave atop the big mountain that overlooks
Verrières. I’ve told how several times when I spent the night in
that cave and looked out over the richest provinces of France, my
heart was afire with ambition: that was my passion in those days....
Well, that cave is precious to me, and nobody can deny that it’s
located in a spot that a philosopher’s heart might envy.... You
know these good congregationists in Besançon can coin money
out of anything; go about it the right way, and they’ll sell you my
mortal remains....
Julien’s superb sense of humor, at the end, enchants us, but what pre-
cisely is Stendhal’s final attitude towards his hero? I take this sentence as
not being ironic: “Never had that head been so poetic as at the moment
when it was about to fall.” Julien is madly in love with Mme de Rênal; the
sincerity of this madness cannot be doubted, but then the suicidal intensi-
ty or sustained drive beyond the pleasure principle of Julien’s last days can-
not be doubted either. Several critics have remarked upon the supposed
similarity between Julien and Don Quixote, but I cannot see it. The Don
lives in the order of play until he is battered out of it; then he dies. What
others call madness is simply the Don’s greatness. But Julien falls into
pathology; it is an attractive craziness, because it makes him more likeable
than before, yet it remains a kind of madness. Stendhal is poor at endings;
Novelists and Novels 75

the conclusion of The Charterhouse of Parma is also weak and abrupt. But I
feel a certain hesitancy in myself at these judgments. Perhaps I simply like
both novels so much that I resent Stendhal’s own apparent loss of interest
when he nears an end. The best defense of Julien’s demise was made by
Stendhal’s subtle disciple, the Prince of Lampedusa, author of The Leopard:
“The author hastens to kill the character in order to be free of him. It is a
dramatic and evocative conclusion unlike any other.” One wants to protest
to the Prince that it isn’t dramatic enough, but he forestalls the complaint:
“The impulsive, energetic handsome Julien spends his last words to tell his
friend how he must go about buying back his body.” Evidently, this is dra-
matic in the mode of The Leopard, where death takes place in the soul, and
the body alone remains living. A Stendhalian pathos, the Prince implies,
belongs only to the happy few; it is a pathos more of sensibility than of
emotion.
Mathilde and Julien, on the occasion of their first night together, are
comic triumphs of sensibility over emotion. “Their transports,” Stendhal
observes, “were a bit conscious,” which is a delicious understatement:

Mlle. de La Mole supposed she was fulfilling a duty to herself and


to her lover. The poor boy, she thought to herself, he’s shown per-
fect bravery, he ought to be happy or else the fault lies in my want
of character. But she would have been glad to ransom herself, at
the cost of eternal misery, from the cruel necessity imposed upon
her.
In spite of the frightful violence with which she repressed her
feelings, she was in perfect command of her speech.
No regret, no reproach came from her lips to spoil this night,
which seemed strange to Julien, rather than happy. What a differ-
ence, good God! from his last stay of twenty-four hours at
Verrières! These fancy Paris fashions have found a way to spoil
everything, even love, he said to himself, in an excess of injustice.
He was indulging in these reflections as he stood in one of the
great mahogany wardrobes into which he had slipped at the first
sounds coming from the next room, which was that of Mme. de
La Mole. Mathilde went off with her mother to mass; the maids
quickly left the room, and Julien easily escaped before they came
back to finish their tasks.
He took a horse and sought out the loneliest parts of the for-
est of Meudon near Paris. He was far more surprised than happy.
The happiness that came from time to time like a gleam of light
in his soul was like that of a young second lieutenant who after
76 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

some astounding action has just been promoted full colonel by the
commanding general; he felt himself raised to an immense height.
Everything that had been far above him yesterday was now at his
level or even beneath him. Gradually Julien’s happiness increased
as it became more remote.
If there was nothing tender in his soul, the reason, however
strange it may seem, was that Mathilde in all her dealings with
him had been doing nothing but her duty. There was nothing
unexpected for her in all the events of the night, except the mis-
ery and shame she had discovered instead of those divine raptures
that novels talk about.
Was I mistaken, don’t I love him at all? she asked herself.

This hilarity of mutual coldness is the prelude to the novel’s most


delightful pages, as Stendhal surpasses himself in depicting the agon that
springs up between these two titanic vanities. What Hobbes was to the
principles of civil society, Stendhal was to the principles of eros. Neither
man should be called a cynic. Each is more than a psychologist, because
both saw the truth of the state of nature. Hobbes is to Stendhal what
Schopenhauer was to the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina, the philosopher who
confirms the insights so central to the novelist that they scarcely require
confirmation. I would prefer to put it more starkly; if you repeatedly read
The Red and the Black, then Leviathan becomes a fascinating redundancy,
just as a deep knowledge of Anna Karenina renders The World as Will and
Representation almost superfluous. Stendhal, and Tolstoy, are in their anti-
thetical ways the true philosophers of love between the sexes, the dark
metaphysicians of the unconscious verities of desire.
N O V E L I S T S
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A N D
(1797–1851)

N O V E L S
Frankenstein

there is a fire
And motion of the soul which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire.
BYRON. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 3

Ere Babylon was dust,


The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more
SHELLEY. Prometheus Unbound, act 1

THE MOTION-PICTURE viewer WHO CARRIES HIS OBSCURE BUT STILL


authentic taste for the sublime to the neighborhood theater, there to see
the latest in an unending series of Frankensteins, becomes a sharer in a
romantic terror now nearly one hundred and fifty years old. Mary Shelley,
barely nineteen years of age when she wrote the original Frankenstein, was
the daughter of two great intellectual rebels, William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft, and the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, another great
rebel and an unmatched lyrical poet. Had she written nothing, Mary

77
78 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Shelley would be remembered today. She is remembered in her own right


as the author of a novel valuable in itself but also prophetic of an intellec-
tual world to come, a novel depicting a Prometheanism that is with us still.
“Frankenstein,” to most of us, is the name of a monster rather than of
a monster’s creator, for the common reader and the common viewer have
worked together, in their apparent confusion, to create a myth soundly
based on a central duality in Mary Shelley’s novel. A critical discussion of
Frankenstein needs to begin from an insight first recorded by Richard
Church and Muriel Spark: the monster and his creator are the antithetical
halves of a single being. Spark states the antithesis too cleanly; for her
Victor Frankenstein represents the feelings, and his nameless creature the
intellect. In her view the monster has no emotion, and “what passes for
emotion ... are really intellectual passions arrived at through rational chan-
nels.” Spark carries this argument far enough to insist that the monster is
asexual and that he demands a bride from Frankenstein only for compan-
ionship, a conclusion evidently at variance with the novel’s text.
The antithesis between the scientist and his creature in Frankenstein is
a very complex one and can be described more fully in the larger context of
Romantic literature and its characteristic mythology. The shadow or dou-
ble of the self is a constant conceptual image in Blake and Shelley and a fre-
quent image, more random and descriptive, in the other major Romantics,
especially in Byron. In Frankenstein it is the dominant and recurrent image
and accounts for much of the latent power the novel possesses.
Mary Shelley’s husband was a divided being, as man and as poet, just
as his friend Byron was, though in Shelley the split was more radical.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is the full title of Mary Shelley’s
novel, and while Victor Frankenstein is not Shelley (Clerval is rather more
like the poet), the Modern Prometheus is a very apt term for Shelley or for
Byron. Prometheus is the mythic figure who best suits the uses of
Romantic poetry, for no other traditional being has in him the full range
of Romantic moral sensibility and the full Romantic capacity for creation
and destruction.
No Romantic writer employed the Prometheus archetype without a
full awareness of its equivocal potentialities. The Prometheus of the
ancients had been for the most part a spiritually reprehensible figure,
though frequently a sympathetic one, in terms both of his dramatic situa-
tion and in his close alliance with mankind against the gods. But this
alliance had been ruinous for man in most versions of the myth, and the
Titan’s benevolence toward humanity was hardly sufficient recompense for
the alienation of man from heaven that he had brought about. Both sides
of Titanism are evident in earlier Christian references to the story. The
Novelists and Novels 79

same Prometheus who is taken as an analogue of the crucified Christ is


regarded also as a type of Lucifer, a son of light justly cast, out by an
offended heaven.
In the Romantic readings of Milton’s Paradise Lost (and Frankenstein
is implicitly one such reading) this double identity of Prometheus is a vital
element. Blake, whose mythic revolutionary named Orc is another version
of Prometheus, saw Milton’s Satan as a Prometheus gone wrong, as desire
restrained until it became only the shadow of desire, a diminished double
of creative energy. Shelley went further in judging Milton’s Satan as an
imperfect Prometheus, inadequate because his mixture of heroic and base
qualities engendered in the reader’s mind a “pernicious casuistry” inimical
to the spirit of art.
Blake, more systematic a poet than Shelley, worked out an antithesis
between symbolic figures he named Spectre and Emanation, the shadow of
desire and the total form of desire, respectively. A reader of Frankenstein,
recalling the novel’s extraordinary conclusion, with its scenes of obsession-
al pursuit through the Arctic wastes, can recognize the same imagery
applied to a similar symbolic situation in Blake’s lyric on the strife of
Spectre and Emanation:

My Spectre around me night and day


Like a Wild beast guards my way.
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my Sin.

A Fathomless and boundless deep,


There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.

He scents thy footsteps in the snow,


Wheresoever thou dost go
Thro’ the wintry hail and rain.

Frankenstein’s monster, tempting his revengeful creator on through a


world of ice, is another Emanation pursued by a Spectre, with the enor-
mous difference that he is an Emanation flawed, a nightmare of actuality,
rather than dream of desire. Though abhorred rather than loved, the mon-
ster is the total form of Frankenstein’s creative power and is more imagi-
native than his creator. The monster is at once more intellectual and more
emotional than his maker; indeed he excels Frankenstein as much (and in
80 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the same ways) as Milton’s Adam excels Milton’s God in Paradise Lost. The
greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley’s
novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless
being, as much a Modern Adam as his creator is a Modern Prometheus, is
more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and
more to be feared, and above all more able to give the attentive reader that
shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic recognition compels a
heightened realization of the self. For like Blake’s Spectre and Emanation
or Shelley’s Alastor and Epipsyche, Frankenstein and his monster are the
solipsistic and generous halves of the one self. Frankenstein is the mind
and emotions turned in upon themselves, and his creature is the mind and
emotions turned imaginatively outward, seeking a greater humanization
through a confrontation of other selves.
I am suggesting that what makes Frankenstein an important book,
though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its nar-
rative and characterization, is that it contains one of the most vivid versions
we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that resembles Blake’s
Book of Urizen, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Byron’s Manfred, among
other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexi-
ty of such works, Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the arche-
typal world of the Romantics.
William Godwin, though a tendentious novelist, was a powerful one,
and the prehistory of his daughter’s novel begins with his best work of fic-
tion, Caleb Williams (1794). Godwin summarized the climactic (and har-
rowing) final third of his novel as a pattern of flight and pursuit, “the fugi-
tive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst
calamities, and the pursuer, by his ingenuity and resources, keeping his vic-
tim in a state of the most fearful alarm.” Mary Shelley brilliantly reverses
this pattern in the final sequence of her novel, and she takes from Caleb
Williams also her destructive theme of the monster’s war against “the
whole machinery of human society,” to quote the words of Caleb Williams
while in prison. Muriel Spark argues that Frankenstein can be read as a
reaction “against the rational-humanism of Godwin and Shelley,” and she
points to the equivocal preface that Shelley wrote to his wife’s novel, in
order to support this view. Certainly Shelley was worried lest the novel be
taken as a warning against the inevitable moral consequences of an
unchecked experimental Prometheanism and scientific materialism. The
preface insists that:

The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situ-
ation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing
Novelists and Novels 81

always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be


drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical
doctrine of whatever kind.

Shelley had, throughout his own work, a constant reaction against


Godwin’s rational humanism, but his reaction was systematically and con-
sciously one of heart against head. In the same summer in the Swiss Alps
that saw the conception of Frankenstein, Shelley composed two poems that
lift the thematic conflict of the novel to the level of the true sublime. In the
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” the poet’s heart interprets an inconstant
grace and loveliness, always just beyond the range of the human senses, as
being the only beneficent force in life, and he prays to this force to be more
constant in its attendance upon him and all mankind. In a greater sister-
hymn, “Mont Blanc,” an awesome meditation upon a frightening natural
scene, the poet’s head issues an allied but essentially contrary report. The
force, or power, is there, behind or within the mountain, but its external
workings upon us are either indifferent or malevolent, and this power is
not to be prayed to. It can teach us, but what it teaches us is our own dan-
gerous freedom from nature, the necessity for our will to become a signif-
icant part of materialistic necessity. Though “Mont Blanc” works its way
to an almost heroic conclusion, it is also a poem of horror and reminds us
that Frankenstein first confronts his conscious monster in the brooding
presence of Mont Blanc, and to the restless music of one of Shelley’s lyrics
of Mutability.
In Prometheus Unbound the split between head and heart is not healed,
but the heart is allowed dominance. The hero, Prometheus, like
Frankenstein, has made a monster, but this monster is Jupiter, the God of
all institutional and historical religions, including organized Christianity.
Salvation from this conceptual error comes through love alone; but love in
this poem, as elsewhere in Shelley, is always closely shadowed by ruin.
Indeed, what choice spirits in Shelley perpetually encounter is ruin mas-
querading as love, pain presenting itself as pleasure. The tentative way out
of this situation in Shelley’s poetry is through the quest for a feeling mind
and an understanding heart, which is symbolized by the sexual reunion of
Prometheus and his Emanation, Asia. Frederick A. Pottle sums up
Prometheus Unbound by observing its meaning to be that “the head must
sincerely forgive, must willingly eschew hatred on purely experimental
grounds,” while “the affections must exorcize the demons of infancy,
whether personal or of the race.” In the light cast by these profound and
precise summations, the reader can better understand both Shelley’s lyri-
cal drama and his wife’s narrative of the Modern Prometheus.
82 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

There are two paradoxes at the center of Mary Shelley’s novel, and
each illuminates a dilemma of the Promethean imagination. The first is
that Frankenstein was successful, in that he did create Natural Man, not as
he was, but as the meliorists saw such a man; indeed, Frankenstein did bet-
ter than this, since his creature was, as we have seen, more imaginative than
himself. Frankenstein’s tragedy stems not from his Promethean excess but
from his own moral error, his failure to love; he abhorred his creature,
became terrified, and fled his responsibilities.
The second paradox is the more ironic. This either would not have
happened or would not have mattered anyway, if Frankenstein had been an
aesthetically successful maker; a beautiful “monster,” or even a passable
one, would not have been a monster. As the creature bitterly observes in
chapter 17,

Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me
in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would
bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his
acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insur-
mountable barriers to our union.

As the hideousness of his creature was no part of Victor Frankenstein’s


intention, it is worth noticing how this disastrous matter came to be.
It would not be unjust to characterize Victor Frankenstein, in his act of
creation, as being momentarily a moral idiot, like so many who have done
his work after him. There is an indeliberate humor in the contrast between
the enormity of the scientist’s discovery and the mundane emotions of the
discoverer. Finding that “the minuteness of the parts” slows him down, he
resolves to make his creature “about eight feet in height and proportionably
large.” As he works on, he allows himself to dream that “a new species
would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures
would owe their being to me.” Yet he knows his is a “workshop of filthy cre-
ation,” and he fails the fundamental test of his own creativity. When the
“dull yellow eye” of his creature opens, this creator falls from the autono-
my of a supreme artificer to the terror of a child of earth: “breathless hor-
ror and disgust filled my heart.” He flees his responsibility and sets in
motion the events that will lead to his own Arctic immolation, a fit end for
a being who has never achieved a full sense of another’s existence.
Haunting Mary Shelley’s novel is the demonic figure of the Ancient
Mariner, Coleridge’s major venture into Romantic mythology of the pur-
gatorial self trapped in the isolation of a heightened self-consciousness.
Walton, in Letter 2 introducing the novel, compares himself “to that
Novelists and Novels 83

production of the most imaginative of modern poets.” As a seeker-out of


an unknown passage, Walton is himself a Promethean quester, like
Frankenstein, toward whom he is so compellingly drawn. Coleridge’s
Mariner is of the line of Cain, and the irony of Frankenstein’s fate is that
he too is a Cain, involuntarily murdering all his loved ones through the
agency of his creature. The Ancient Mariner is punished by living under
the curse of his consciousness of guilt, while the excruciating torment of
Frankenstein is never to be able to forget his guilt in creating a lonely con-
sciousness driven to crime by the rage of unwilling solitude.
It is part of Mary Shelley’s insight into her mythological theme that all
the monster’s victims are innocents. The monster not only refuses actively
to slay his guilty creator, he mourns for him, though with the equivocal
tribute of terming the scientist a “generous and self-devoted being.”
Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus who has violated nature, receives
his epitaph from the ruined second nature he has made, the God-aban-
doned, who consciously echoes the ruined Satan of Paradise Lost and pro-
claims, “Evil thenceforth became my good.” It is imaginatively fitting that
the greater and more interesting consciousness of the creature should sur-
vive his creator, for he alone in Mary Shelley’s novel possesses character.
Frankenstein, like Coleridge’s Mariner, has no character in his own right;
both figures win a claim to our attention only by their primordial crimes
against original nature.
The monster is of course Mary Shelley’s finest invention, and his nar-
rative (chaps. 11–16) forms the highest achievement of the novel, more
absorbing even than the magnificent and almost surrealistic pursuit of the
climax. In an age so given to remarkable depictions of the dignity of natu-
ral man, an age including the shepherds and beggars of Wordsworth and
what W. J. Bate has termed Keats’s “polar ideal of disinterestedness”—even
in such a literary time Frankenstein’s hapless creature stands out as a sub-
lime embodiment of heroic pathos. Though Frankenstein lacks the moral
imagination to understand him, the daemon’s appeal is to what is most
compassionate in us:

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample


upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and
affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to
be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from
joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am
irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me
a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
84 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The passage I have italicized is the imaginative kernel of the novel and
is meant to remind the reader of the novel’s epigraph:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay


To mold me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

That desperate plangency of the fallen Adam becomes the character-


istic accent of the daemon’s lamentations, with the influence of Milton
cunningly built into the novel’s narrative by the happy device of
Frankenstein’s creature receiving his education through reading Paradise
Lost as “a true history.” Already doomed because his standards are human,
which makes him an outcast even to himself, his Miltonic education com-
pletes his fatal growth in self-consciousness. His story, as told to his maker,
follows a familiar Romantic pattern “of the progress of my intellect,” as he
puts it. His first pleasure after the dawn of consciousness comes through
his wonder at seeing the moon rise. Caliban-like, he responds wonderful-
ly to music, both natural and human, and his sensitivity to the natural
world has the responsiveness of an incipient poet. His awakening to a first
love for other beings, the inmates of the cottage he haunts, awakens him
also to the great desolation of love rejected when he attempts to reveal
himself. His own duality of situation and character, caught between the
states of Adam and Satan, Natural Man and his thwarted desire, is related
by him directly to his reading of Milton’s epic:

It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an


omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting.
I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me,
to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any
other being in existence, but his state was far different from mine in
every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a
perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial
care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire
knowledge from beings of a superior nature; but I was wretched,
helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter
emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the
bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.

From a despair this profound, no release is possible. Driven forth into


an existence upon which “the cold stars shone in mockery,” the daemon
declares “everlasting war against the species” and enters upon a fallen exis-
Novelists and Novels 85

tence more terrible than the expelled Adam’s. Echoing Milton, he asks the
ironic question “And now, with the world before me, whither should I
bend my steps?” to which the only possible answer is, toward his wretched
Promethean creator.
If we stand back from Mary Shelley’s novel in order better to view its
archetypal shape, we see it as the quest of a solitary and ravaged conscious-
ness first for consolation, then for revenge, and finally for a self-destruction
that will be apocalyptic, that will bring down the creator with his creature.
Though Mary Shelley may not have intended it, her novel’s prime theme is
a necessary counterpoise to Prometheanism, for Prometheanism exalts the
increase in consciousness despite all cost. Frankenstein breaks through the
barrier that separates man from God and gives apparent life, but in doing
so he gives only death-in-life. The profound dejection endemic in Mary
Shelley’s novel is fundamental to the Romantic mythology of the self, for all
Romantic horrors are diseases of excessive consciousness, of the self unable
to bear the self. Kierkegaard remarks that Satan’s despair is absolute because
Satan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his
predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair.
Frankenstein’s desperate creature attains the state of pure spirit through his
extraordinary situation and is racked by a consciousness in which every
thought is a fresh disease.
A Romantic poet fought against self-consciousness through the
strength of what he called imagination, a more than rational energy by
which thought could seek to heal itself. But Frankenstein’s daemon,
though he is in the archetypal situation of the Romantic Wanderer or
Solitary, who sometimes was a poet, can win no release from his own story
by telling it. His desperate desire for a mate is clearly an attempt to find a
Shelleyan Epipsyche or Blakean Emanation for himself, a self within the
self. But as he is the nightmare actualization of Frankenstein’s desire, he is
himself an emanation of Promethean yearnings, and his only double is his
creator and denier.
When Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner progressed from the purgatory of
consciousness to his very minimal control of imagination, he failed to save
himself, since he remained in a cycle of remorse, but he at least became a
salutary warning to others and made of the Wedding Guest a wiser and a
better man. Frankenstein’s creature can help neither himself nor others,
for he has no natural ground to which he can return. Romantic poets liked
to return to the imagery of the ocean of life and immortality, for in the
eddying to and fro of the healing waters they could picture a hoped-for
process of restoration, of a survival of consciousness despite all its agonies.
Mary Shelley, with marvelous appropriateness, brings her Romantic novel
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to a demonic conclusion in a world of ice. The frozen sea is the inevitable


emblem for both the wretched daemon and his obsessed creator, but the
daemon is allowed a final image of reversed Prometheanism. There is a
heroism fully earned in the being who cries farewell in a claim of sad tri-
umph: “I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony
of the torturing flames.” Mary Shelley could not have known how dark a
prophecy this consummation of consciousness would prove to be for the
two great Promethean poets who were at her side during the summer of
1816, when her novel was conceived. Byron, writing his own epitaph at
Missolonghi in 1824, and perhaps thinking back to having stood at
Shelley’s funeral pile two years before, found an image similar to the dae-
mon’s to sum up an exhausted existence:

The fire that on my bosom preys


Is lone as some volcanic isle;
No torch is kindled at its blaze—
A funeral pile.

The fire of increased consciousness stolen from heaven ends as an iso-


lated volcano cut off from other selves by an estranging sea. “The light of
that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the
winds” is the exultant cry of Frankenstein’s. creature. A blaze at which no
torch is kindled is Byron’s self-image, but he ends his death poem on
another note, the hope for a soldier’s grave, which he found. There is no
Promethean release, but release is perhaps not the burden of the literature
of Romantic aspiration. There is something both Godwinian and
Shelleyan about the final utterance of Victor Frankenstein, which is prop-
erly made to Walton, the failed Promethean whose ship has just turned
back. Though chastened, the Modern Prometheus ends with a last word
true, not to his accomplishment, but to his desire:

Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambi-


tion, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguish-
ing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I
have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.

Shelley’s Prometheus, crucified on his icy precipice, found his ultimate


torment in a Fury’s taunt: “And all best things are thus confused to ill.” It
seems a fitting summation for all the work done by modern
Prometheanism and might have served as an alternate epigraph for Mary
Shelley’s disturbing novel.
N O V E L I S T S
Honoré de Balzac

A N D
(1799–1850)

N O V E L S
Père Goriot

I LOVE BEST ABOUT BALZAC THAT HE RENEWS, FOR ME, THE ROMANCE OF
reading, as even Henry James and Flaubert do not. Like every other young
reader who first comes to Balzac in adolescence, I was swept away by the
marvelous Vautrin, first encountered by me in Père Goriot:

Vautrin, the forty-year-old with dyed side-whiskers, stood


somewhere between these two and the rest of the lodgers. He was
one of those about whom ordinary people say: “Now that’s really
somebody!” He was broad-shouldered with a well-developed chest
and bulging muscles, and thick, square hands, the knuckles deco-
rated with great tufts of flaming red hair. His face, scored by pre-
mature wrinkles, showed signs of a toughness that belied his good-
natured, easy-going manners. His booming bass voice, which
matched his loud cheerfulness, was emphatically pleasant. He was
obliging and full of laughter. If a lock stopped working, he’d quick-
ly take it apart, figure out what was wrong, file it down, oil it, then
put it back together again, observing, “I know all about such
things.” There were a lot of other things he knew about—ships,
the sea, France, foreign nations, business, psychology, current
affairs, the law, hotels, and prisons. When anyone complained too
much, he’d immediately offer his services. More than once, he’d
lent money both to Madame Vauquer and to some of her lodgers,
but his debtors would sooner have died than not repay him,
because for all his friendliness he had a look about him, deep,
determined, that made people afraid. The very way he spat showed

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his unshakable composure; put in a difficult position, he’d obvi-


ously never hesitate to commit a crime, to get himself out of it.
Like a stern judge, his glance seemed to pierce to the bottom of
every issue, every conscience, every emotion.

Burton Raffel’s translation splendidly conveys Balzac’s fascination with


Vautrin, the novelist’s own daemon or genius. Graham Robb, Balzac’s best
biographer, tells us that the novelist’s friends called him “Vautrin.” Like
Vautrin, Balzac divided the cosmos between deceivers and the deceived:
the grand crimemaster exemplifies Balzac’s own cynical egomania. Again
like Balzac, Vautrin is a monster of energy: a force of nature who also hap-
pens to be a man.
Vautrin is overtly homoerotic; Balzac, sublime womanizer, projected
his own barely repressed sexual duality, reminiscent of Byron’s who, with
Molière, Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Rabelais, can be
considered Balzac’s literary forerunners. There is something of Byron’s
Manfred and Cain in Vautrin: the line of descent from Milton’s Satan is
clear, since Vautrin has read Paradise Lost. There is a Byronic-Satanic aura
surrounding Vautrin, at once sinister, compelling, and strangely genial,
intermixed with the savagery.
“Vautrin” is one of the pseudonyms of Jacques Collin, known to all as
“Death-Dodger.” The powerful scene of his arrest in Part Three of Père
Goriot justifies his nickname:

“In the name of the law, and the name of the King,” announced
one of the officers, though there was such a loud murmur of
astonishment that no one could hear him.
But silence quickly descended once again, as the lodgers moved
aside, making room for three of the men, who came forward, their
hands in their pockets, and loaded pistols in their hands. Two uni-
formed policemen stepped into the doorway they’d left, and two
others appeared in the other doorway, near the stairs. Soldiers’
footsteps, and the readying of their rifles, echoed from the pave-
ment outside, in front of the house. Death-Dodger had no hope
of escape; everyone stared at him, irresistibly drawn. Vidocq went
directly to where he stood, and swiftly punched Collin in the head
with such force that his wig flew off, revealing the stark horror of
his skull. Brick-red, short-clipped hair gave him a look at once sly
and powerful, and both head and face, blending perfectly, now,
with his brutish chest, glowed with the fierce, burning light of a
hellish mind. It was suddenly obvious to them all just who Vautrin
Novelists and Novels 89

was, what he’d done, what he’d been doing, what he would go on
to do; they suddenly understood at a glance his implacable ideas,
his religion of self-indulgence, exactly the sort of royal sensibility
which tinted all his thoughts with cynicism, as well as all his
actions, and supported both by the strength of an organization
prepared for anything. The blood rose into his face, his eyes
gleamed like some savage cat’s. He seemed to explode into a ges-
ture of such wild energy, and he roared with such ferocity that,
one and all, the lodgers cried out in terror. His fierce, feral move-
ment, and the general clamor he’d created, made the policemen
draw their weapons. But seeing the gleam of the cocked pistols,
Collin immediately understood his peril, and instantly proved
himself possessor of the highest of all human powers. It was a hor-
rible, majestic spectacle! His face could only be compared to some
apparatus, full of billowing smoke capable of moving mountains,
but dissolved in the twinkling of an eye by a single drop of cold
water. The drop that doused his rage flickered as rapidly as a flash
of light. Then he slowly smiled, and turned to look down at his
wig.
“This isn’t one of your polite days, is it, old boy?” he said to
Vidocq. And then he held out his hands to the policemen, beck-
oning them with a movement of his head. “Gentlemen, officers,
I’m ready for your handcuffs or your chains, as you please. I ask
those present to take due note of the fact that I offer no resist-
ance.”

That prenatural transition from absolute rage to cunning composure


is definitive of Vautrin. Is it not also definitive of the astonishing genius of
Balzac? The best critical remark yet made about Balzac is Baudelaire’s:
“even the janitors have some sort of genius.” The genius-of-geniuses, in
Balzac, is Vautrin, though the novelist himself might have voted for his
idealized visionary, Louis Lambert.
Zola, Balzac’s disciple, dared to compare the author of The Human
Comedy to Shakespeare. Balzac cannot sustain the comparison: if somehow
you fused Dante and Cervantes, you would have Shakespeare’s equal.
Proust, the culmination of the French novel, charmingly said of Balzac:
“He hides nothing, he says everything,” and yet indicated the “silence” also
to be found amidst all that disclosure.
It seems odd to me that Henry James, who condemned the novels of
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as “loose, baggy monsters,” asserted that he had
learned “the lesson of Balzac.” Though James does not say so explicitly, it
90 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

must have been the lesson of energy, of psychic force. Perhaps Balzac
helped teach Henry James the fictive economy of energy, the transforma-
tion of instinctive vitality into art.
That returns me to Vautrin, the most vitalistic of all Balzac’s creatures.
Toward the close of Lost Illusions, the young poet Lucien Chardon, deter-
mined upon suicide, encounters a supposed Spanish priest, Carlos
Herrera, Canon of Toledo, another disguise of Death-Dodger. Herrera-
Vautrin restores Lucien to life with a torrent of money, at the expense of a
clear enough homoerotic bond between the criminal-priest and the poet.
That bond is the center of the great novel, A Harlot High and Low
(Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans). Part Four of the novel is the
extraordinary The Last Incarnation of Vautrin, in which Death Dodger
becomes the head of the Sûreté, as titanic a police-chief as he had been
King of the Underworld. It is as if Milton’s Satan had entered again into
God’s favor and emerged as the Archangel Michael. Perhaps it is Balzac’s
ultimate thrust at societal power, and also the expression of the novelist’s
nostalgia for possession of and union with that power.
N O V E L I S T S
Nathaniel Hawthorne

A N D
(1804–1864)

N O V E L S
The Scarlet Letter

THE LONELY ART OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE REMAINS ONE OF THE


cultural monuments of our nation. It continues to provide for the deepest
imaginative needs of the solitary reader, of whatever country. Hawthorne’s
vision of reality remains unsurpassed, short of Shakespeare and Dante. The
Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun trouble the heart and stimulate the intel-
lect. As Herman Melville and Henry James testified, Hawthorne is a mar-
velously subtle storyteller and revealer of the soul. Only James himself and
William Faulkner ultimately challenge Hawthorne as the American novelist
(despite some remarkable tales, Melville remains the author of the one prose-
epic, Moby-Dick, rather than a novelist as such, and Mark Twain abides pri-
marily as the genial sage of Huckleberry Finn, most American of all narratives.)
Rereading The Scarlet Letter always constitutes a lesson in how to read
and why. A procession of extraordinary representations of women has fol-
lowed after Hester Prynne in American literature, yet even the strongest—
Isabel Archer in James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Ántonia in Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia—do not match Hester Prynne in her aesthetic and cultural
reverberations. For Hester is, in many ways, the American Eve, the
Emersonian vision that atones for our lack of any adequate representation
of the American Adam. Like Milton’s own Eve, Hester is far superior to her
fate, and imaginatively preferable to Adam’s (and Milton’s) God.
Hawthorne subtly conveys Hester’s sexual power to us, with far less
ambivalence than Milton manifests in celebrating Eve’s sexual strength.
Sensual and tragic, Hester is larger than her book and her world, because
her greatness of spirit, like her heroic sexuality, is ill-served by the terrible
alternatives of the Satanic Chillingworth (Iago’s understudy) and the timid

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Dimmesdale, an absurdly inadequate adulterous lover for the sublime


Hester.
Hester’s Self-Reliance is her authentic religion, and enables her to sur-
vive the outrages of societal ostracism and erotic repression. As critics
rightly point out, Hester is herself an artist, whose work as embroiderer
parallels Hawthorne’s own art as romancer. Can we not call Hester
Hawthorne’s Muse or Interior Paramour (to employ a fine phrase of
Wallace Stevens)? As such Hester exerts a fierce pressure upon Hawthorne
himself, compelling him to abandon romance for the psychological novel,
almost despite his own preferences.
Even The Marble Faun, so much prophecy of the novel of Americans
abroad, from Henry James and Edith Wharton through Hemingway and
Scott Fitzgerald, is not quite of the eminence of The Scarlet Letter. There
are only a dozen or so of essential American literary classics, including
Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, Emerson’s Essays and Thoreau’s Walden,
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Emily Dickinson’s poems, James’s The
Portrait of a Lady and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the poems of Wallace
Stevens and Hart Crane, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. That
brief catalog would be achingly incomplete without The Scarlet Letter, a
permanent center of our imaginative consciousness.
N O V E L I S T S
Charles Dickens

A N D
(1812–1870)

N O V E L S
I

COURAGE WOULD BE THE CRITICAL VIRTUE MOST REQUIRED IF ANYONE


were to attempt an essay that might be called “The Limitations of
Shakespeare.” Tolstoy, in his most outrageous critical performance, more
or less tried just that, with dismal results, and even Ben Jonson might not
have done much better, had he sought to extend his ambivalent obiter dicta
on his great friend and rival. Nearly as much courage, or foolhardiness, is
involved in discoursing on the limitations of Dickens, but the young Henry
James had a critical gusto that could carry him through every literary chal-
lenge. Reviewing Our Mutual Friend in 1865, James exuberantly pro-
claimed that “Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was labored; the present
work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.” At about this time, reviewing
Drum-Taps, James memorably dismissed Whitman as an essentially prosa-
ic mind seeking to lift itself, by muscular exertion, into poetry. To reject
some of the major works of the strongest English novelist and the greatest
American poet, at about the same moment, is to set standards for critical
audacity that no one since has been able to match, even as no novelist since
has equalled Dickens, nor any poet, Walt Whitman.
James was at his rare worst in summing up Dickens’s supposedly prin-
cipal inadequacy:

Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits of Mr. Dickens’s
insight. Insight is, perhaps, too strong a word; for we are con-
vinced that it is one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see
beneath the surface of things. If we might hazard a definition of his
literary character, we should, accordingly, call him the greatest of

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superficial novelists. We are aware that this definition confines


him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he
adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It
were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr.
Dickens among the greatest novelists. For, to repeat what we have
already intimated, he has created nothing but figure. He has
added nothing to our understanding of human character. He is
master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is com-
monplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. The value of the
former service is questionable; and the manner in which Mr.
Dickens performs it sometimes conveys a certain impression of
charlatanism. The value of the latter service is incontestable, and
here Mr. Dickens is an honest, an admirable artist.

This can be taken literally, and then transvalued: to see truly the sur-
face of things, to reconcile us at once to the commonplace and the odd—
these are not minor gifts. In 1860, John Ruskin, the great seer of the sur-
face of things, the charismatic illuminator of the commonplace and the
odd together, had reached a rather different conclusion from that of the
young Henry James, five years before James’s brash rejection:

The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings have been


unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons merely because
he presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely,
because Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never mistak-
en. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us
are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his bril-
liant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement;
and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such
as that which he handled in Hard Times, that he would use sever-
er and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that work (to my
mind, in several respects, the greatest he has written) is with many
persons seriously diminished because Mr. Bounderby is a dramat-
ic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master;
and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a charac-
teristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the use
of Dickens’s wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a cir-
cle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose
in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard
Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons
interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial,
Novelists and Novels 95

and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the
evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it
will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally
right one, grossly and sharply told.

To say of Dickens that he chose “to speak in a circle of stage fire” is


exactly right, since Dickens is the greatest actor among novelists, the finest
master of dramatic projection. A superb stage performer, he never stops
performing in his novels, which is not the least of his many Shakespearean
characteristics. Martin Price usefully defines some of these as “his effort-
less invention, his brilliant play of language, the scope and density of his
imagined world.” I like also Price’s general comparison of Dickens to the
strongest satirist in the language, Swift, a comparison that Price shrewdly
turns into a confrontation:

But the confrontation helps us to define differences as well:


Dickens is more explicit, more overtly compassionate, insisting
always upon the perversions of feeling as well as of thought. His
outrage is of the same consistency as his generous celebration, the
satirical wit of the same copious extravagance as the comic elabo-
rations. Dickens’ world is alive with things that snatch, lurch,
teeter, thrust, leer; it is the animate world of Netherlandish genre
painting or of Hogarth’s prints, where all space is a field of force,
where objects vie or intrigue with each other, where every human
event spills over into the things that surround it. This may
become the typically crowded scene of satire, where persons are
reduced to things and things to matter in motion; or it may pul-
sate with fierce energy and noisy feeling. It is different from Swift;
it is the distinctive Dickensian plenitude, which we find again in
his verbal play, in his great array of vivid characters, in his massed
scenes of feasts or public declamations. It creates rituals as com-
pelling as the resuscitation of Rogue Riderhood, where strangers
participate solemnly in the recovery of a spark of life, oblivious for
the moment of the unlovely human form it will soon inhabit.

That animate, Hogarthian world, “where all space is a field of force,”


indeed is a plenitude and it strikes me that Price’s vivid description suggests
Rabelais rather than Swift as a true analogue. Dickens, like Shakespeare in
one of many aspects and like Rabelais, is as much carnival as stage fire, a
kind of endless festival. The reader of Dickens stands in the midst of a fes-
tival, which is too varied, too multiform, to be taken in even by innumer-
96 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

able readings. Something always escapes our ken; Ben Jonson’s sense of
being “rammed with life” is exemplified more even by Dickens than by
Rabelais, in that near-Shakespearean plenitude that is Dickens’s peculiar
glory.
Is it possible to define that plenitude narrowly enough so as to con-
ceptualize it for critical use, though by “conceptualize” one meant only a
critical metaphor? Shakespearean representation is no touchstone for
Dickens or for anyone else, since above all modes of representation it turns
upon an inward changing brought about by characters listening to them-
selves speak. Dickens cannot do that. His villains are gorgeous, but there
are no Iagos or Edmunds among them. The severer, more relevant test,
which Dickens must fail, though hardly to his detriment, is Falstaff, who
generates not only his own meaning, but meaning in so many others
besides, both on and off the page. Probably the severest test is Shylock,
most Dickensian of Shakespeare’s characters, since we cannot say of
Dickens’s Shylock, Fagin, that there is much Shakespearean about him at
all. Fagin is a wonderful grotesque, but the winds of will are not stirred in
him, while they burn on hellishly forever in Shylock.
Carlyle’s injunction, to work in the will, seems to have little enough
place in the cosmos of the Dickens characters. I do not say this to indicate
a limitation, or even a limit, nor do I believe that the will to live or the will
to power is ever relaxed in or by Dickens. But nothing is got for nothing,
except perhaps in or by Shakespeare, and Dickens purchases his kind of
plenitude at the expense of one aspect of the will. T.S. Eliot remarked that
“Dickens’s characters are real because there is no one like them.” I would
modify that to “They are real because they are not like one another,
though sometimes they are a touch more like some of us than like each
other.” Perhaps the will, in whatever aspect, can differ only in degree
rather than in kind among us. The aesthetic secret of Dickens appears to
be that his villains, heroes, heroines, victims, eccentrics, ornamental
beings, do differ from one another in the kinds of will that they possess. Since
that is hardly possible for us, as humans, it does bring about an absence in
reality in and for Dickens. That is a high price to pay, but it is a good deal
less than everything and Dickens got more than he paid for. We also
receive a great deal more than we ever are asked to surrender when we read
Dickens. That may indeed be his most Shakespearean quality, and may
provide the critical trope I quest for in him. James and Proust hurt you
more than Dickens does, and the hurt is the meaning, or much of it. What
hurts in Dickens never has much to do with meaning, because there can-
not be a poetics of pain where the will has ceased to be common or sadly
uniform. Dickens really does offer a poetics of pleasure, which is surely
Novelists and Novels 97

worth our secondary uneasiness at his refusal to offer us any accurately


mimetic representations of the human will. He writes always the book of
the drives, which is why supposedly Freudian readings of him always fail
so tediously. The conceptual metaphor he suggests in his representations
of character and personality is neither Shakespearean mirror nor Romantic
lamp, neither Rabelaisian carnival nor Fieldingesque open country. “Stage
fire” seems to me perfect, for “stage” removes something of the reality of
the will, yet only as modifier. The substantive remains “fire.” Dickens is
the poet of the fire of the drives, the true celebrant of Freud’s myth of fron-
tier concepts, of that domain lying on the border between psyche and
body, falling into matter, yet partaking of the reality of both.

A Tale of Two Cities

Except perhaps for Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities always has been the
most popular of Dickens’s books, if we set aside also the annual phenome-
non of A Christmas Carol and the other Christmas books. No critic how-
ever would rank it with such other later novels as Great Expectations and
Our Mutual Friend or the unfinished Edwin Drood, or with the many earli-
er and middle period masterpieces. The harshest single judgment remains
that of the now forgotten but formidably pungent reviewer Sir James
Fitzjames Stephen, who left Dickens nothing:

The moral tone of the Tale of Two Cities is not more wholesome
than that of its predecessors, nor does it display any nearer
approach to a solid knowledge of the subject-matter to which it
refers. Mr. Dickens observes in his preface—“It has been one of
my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means
of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to
add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.”
The allusion to Mr. Carlyle confirms the presumption which the
book itself raises, that Mr. Dickens happened to have read the
History of the French Revolution, and, being on the look-out for a
subject, determined off-hand to write a novel about it. Whether
he has any other knowledge of the subject than a single reading of
Mr. Carlyle’s work would supply does not appear, but certainly
what he has written shows no more. It is exactly the sort of story
which a man would write who had taken down Mr. Carlyle’s the-
ory without any sort of inquiry or examination, but with a com-
fortable conviction that “nothing could be added to its philoso-
phy.” The people, says Mr. Dickens, in effect, had been degraded
98 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

by long and gross misgovernment, and acted like wild beasts in


consequence. There is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in this view
of the matter, but it is such very elementary truth that, unless a
man had something new to say about it, it is hardly worth men-
tioning; and Mr. Dickens supports it by specific assertions which,
if not absolutely false, are at any rate so selected as to convey an
entirely false impression. It is a shameful thing for a popular
writer to exaggerate the faults of the French aristocracy in a book
which will naturally find its way to readers who know very little of
the subject except what he chooses to tell them; but it is impossi-
ble not to feel that the melodramatic story which Mr. Dickens
tells about the wicked Marquis who violates one of his serfs and
murders another, is a grossly unfair representation of the state of
society in France in the middle of the eighteenth century. That
the French noblesse had much to answer for in a thousand ways, is
a lamentable truth; but it is by no means true that they could rob,
murder, and ravish with impunity. When Count Horn thought
proper to try the experiment under the Regency, he was broken
on the wheel, notwithstanding his nobility; and the sort of atroci-
ties which Mr. Dickens depicts as characteristic of the eighteenth
century were neither safe nor common in the fourteenth.

The most palpable hit here is certainly Dickens’s extraordinary


reliance upon Carlyle’s bizarre but effective French Revolution, which is not
the history it purports to be but rather has the design, rhetoric, and vision
of an apocalyptic fantasy. No one now would read either Carlyle or
Dickens in order to learn anything about the French Revolution, and sadly
enough no one now reads Carlyle anyway. Yet Stephen’s dismay remains
legitimate; countless thousands continue to receive the only impressions
they ever will have of the French Revolution through the reading of A Tale
of Two Cities. The book remains a great tale, a vivid instance of Dickens’s
preternatural gifts as a pure storyteller, though except for its depiction of
the superbly ghastly Madame Defarge and her Jacobin associates it lacks
the memorable grotesques and driven enthusiasts that we expect from
Dickens.
The most palpable flaw in the novel is the weakness as representations
of Lucie and Darnay, and the relative failure of the more crucial Carton,
who simply lacks the aesthetic dignity that Dickens so desperately needed
to give him. If Carton and Darnay, between them, really were meant to
depict the spiritual form of Charles Dickens, then their mutual lack of
gusto renders them even more inadequate. When Madame Defarge dies,
Novelists and Novels 99

slain by her own bullet, we are very moved, particularly by relief that such
an unrelenting version of the death drive will cease to menace us. When
Carton, looking “sublime and prophetic,” goes to execution, Dickens
attempts to move us: we receive the famous and unacceptable, “It is a far,
far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest
that I go to than I have ever known.” Dickens owes us a far, far better rhet-
oric than that, and generally he delivers it.
The life of A Tale of Two Cities is elsewhere, centered upon the nega-
tive sublimity of Madame Defarge and her knitting, which is one of
Dickens’s finest inventions, and is clearly a metaphor for the storytelling of
the novel itself. Dickens hardly would have said: “I am Madame Defarge,”
but she, like the author, remorselessly controls the narrative, until she loses
her struggle with the epitome of a loving Englishwoman, Miss Pross. The
book’s penultimate chapter, in which we are rid of Madame Defarge, is
shrewdly called “The Knitting Done.”
Even Dickens rarely surpasses the nightmare intensity of Madame
Defarge, her absolute command of stage fire, and his finest accomplish-
ment in the book is to increase her already stark aura as the narrative knits
onwards. Here is a superb early epiphany of the lady, putting heart into her
formidable husband, who seems weak only in comparison to his wife, less
a force of nature than of history:

The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so
foul a neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge’s olfac-
tory sense was by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt
much stronger than it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and
brandy and aniseed. He whiffed the compound of scents away, as
he put down his smoked-out pipe.
“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she knot-
ted the money. “There are only the usual odours.”
“I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged.
“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes
had never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray
or two for him. “Oh, the men, the men!”
“But my dear!” began Defarge.
“But my dear!” repeated madame, nodding firmly; “but my
dear! You are faint of heart to-night, my dear!”
“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of
his breast, “it is a long time.”
“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long
time? Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”
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“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,”
said Defarge.
“How long,” demanded madame, composely, “does it take to
make and store the lightning? Tell me.”
Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something
in that too.
“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake
to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare
the earthquake?”
“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.
“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces every-
thing before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it
is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”
She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.
“I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for
emphasis, “that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the
road and coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell
thee it is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of
all the world that we know, consider the faces of all the world that
we know, consider the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie
addresses itself with more and more of certainty every hour. Can
such things last? Bah! I mock you.”
“My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with
his head a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a
docile and attentive pupil before his catechist, “I do not question
all this. But it has lasted a long time, and it is possible—you know
well, my wife, it is possible—that it may not come, during our
lives.”
“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another knot,
as if there were another enemy strangled.
“Well!” said Defarge, with a half-complaining and half-apolo-
getic shrug. “We shall not see the triumph.”
“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her extend-
ed hand in strong action. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I
believe, with all my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even
if not, even if I knew certainly not, show me the neck of an aris-
tocrat and tyrant, and still I would—”
Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot
indeed.
“Hold!” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged
with cowardice; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.”
Novelists and Novels 101

“Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see


your victim and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself
without that. When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil;
but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained—not
shown—yet always ready.”

To be always preparing, unseen and unheard, is Madame Defarge’s one


consolation. Dickens has made her childless, somewhat in the mysterious
mode of Lady Macbeth, since somehow we believe that Madame Defarge
too must have nursed an infant. Her dialogue with Defarge has overtones
of Lady Macbeth heartening Macbeth, keying up his resolution to treason
and a kind of parricide. What Dickens has learned from Shakespeare is the
art of counterpointing degrees of terror, of excess, so as to suggest a dread
that otherwise would reside beyond representation. Macbeth, early doubt-
ing, seems weak in contrast to his wife’s force, but we will see him at his
bloody work, until he becomes an astonishing manifestation of tyranny.
Similarly, Defarge seems little in juxtaposition to his implacable wife, but
we will see him as a demon of courage, skill, and apocalyptic drive, leading
the triumphant assault upon the Bastille.
In his final vision of Madame Defarge, Dickens brilliantly reveals his
masochistic passion for her:

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she


heard, and might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so
went through the mud, and round the corner of the prison wall.
The Vengeance and the Juryman, looking after her as she walked
away, were highly appreciative of her fine figure, and her superb
moral endowments.
There were many women at that time, upon whom the time
laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among
them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking
her way along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of
shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of
beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness
and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition
of those qualities; the troubled time would have heaved her up,
under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a
brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class,
opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely
without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite
gone out of her.
102 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the
sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing
to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an
orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her
natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To
appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity,
even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of
the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would
not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-
morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a
fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her there.
Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe.
Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain
weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap.
Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at
her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking
with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple
freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood,
bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame
Defarge took her way along the streets.

We can discount Dickens’s failed ironies here (“her superb moral


endowments”) and his obvious and rather tiresome moral judgments upon
his own creation. What comes through overwhelmingly is Dickens’s desire
for this sadistic woman, which is the secret of our desire for her also, and
so for her nightmare power over us. “Her fine figure,” “that kind of beau-
ty ... firmness and animosity,” “a tigress ... absolutely without pity,” “a
becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way,” “her dark hair looked
rich,” “confident tread ... supple freedom ... bare-foot and bare-legged”—
these are the stigmata of a dominatrix. Loaded pistol in her bosom, sharp-
ened dagger at her waist, Madame Defarge is the ultimate phallic woman,
a monument to fetishism, to what Freud would have called the splitting of
Dickens’s ego in the defensive process.
That splitting attains a triumph in the grand wrestling match, where
Miss Pross, a Jacob wrestling with the Angel of Death, holds off Madame
Defarge in what is supposed to be an instance of Love stronger than
Death, but which is all the more effective for its sexual overtones:

Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of


the moment, seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held
her tight. It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to
Novelists and Novels 103

strike; Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so


much stronger than hate, clasped her tight, and even lifted her
from the floor in the struggle that they had. The two hands of
Madame Defarge buffeted and tore her face; but, Miss Pross, with
her head down, held her round the waist, and clung to her with
more than the hold of a drowning woman.
Soon, Madame Defarge’s hands ceased to strike, and felt at her
encircled waist. “It is under my arm,” said Miss Pross, in smoth-
ered tones, “you shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless
Heaven for it. I’ll hold you till one or other of us faints or dies!”
Madame Defarge’s hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked
up, saw what it was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and
stood alone—blinded with smoke.

The embrace of Miss Pross clearly has a repressed lesbian passion for
Madame Defarge in it, so that more than a transcendent love for Lucie
here endows the force of the good with its immovable tenacity. But for the
pistol blast, Madame Defarge would have been held until one or the other
lady fainted or died. Miss Pross had never struck a blow in her life, but
then her father Jacob had been no warrior either. Dickens, master of stage
fire, destroyed Madame Defarge in the grand manner, the only fate wor-
thy of so vivid and so passionately desired a creation.

Great Expectations

Together with David Copperfield, Great Expectations is Dickens’s most per-


sonal novel. He reread Copperfield “to be quite sure I had fallen into no
unconscious repetitions” in composing Great Expectations, and his wariness
helped make Pip his most complex protagonist. We hear Dickens’s early
traumas again in Pip’s voice, and yet the author maintains considerable dis-
tance from Pip, as he scarcely does from David Copperfield, whose destiny
is to become a Dickensian novelist.
Pip, like Copperfield, is a superb narrator, but he is frequently unkind
to himself, and the reader is not expected to share in the severity of Pip’s
excessive self-condemnations, which partly ensue from his imaginative
strength. Pip’s imagination always mixes love and guilt, which is very much
the mode of Charles Dickens.
George Bernard Shaw, introducing a reprint of Great Expectations,
remarked that “Pip, like his creator, has no culture and no religion.” We
need to recall that Shaw told us also that he felt only pity for an even
greater writer, whenever he compared the mind of Shakespeare with his
104 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

own! Shaw’s religion was a peculiar kind of Creative Evolution, and his
culture compares poorly with his contemporary, Oscar Wilde’s. Dickens
indeed was a Dickensian in religion, and was deeply grounded in popular
culture, as well as in literary culture.
Whether Pip’s obsessive and unmerited guilt owes more to popular
traditions of shame-culture, or emanates from literary guilt-culture, is very
difficult to determine. One critic, Shuli Barzilai, wisely conjectures that
Pip’s guilt has a deep source in what Freud called “family romances,” so
that his relationship with Estella is quasi-incestuous, she being (unknow-
ingly) Magwitch’s daughter, while Pip becomes the escaped convict’s
adopted son. What is clear enough is that both Pip and Estella seem
doomed to expiate a guilt not at all their own, the guilt of the fathers and
the mothers.
Dickens notoriously weakened Great Expectations by revising its end-
ing, so that Pip and Estella might be viewed as living together happily ever
after. This revision is manifestly at variance with the imaginative spirit of
the novel, and is best ignored. Pip, properly read, remains a permanent
emblem of something that Dickens could not forgive in himself.

David Copperfield

If the strong writer be defined as one who confronts his own contingency,
his own dependent relation on a precursor, then we can discover only a few
writers after Homer and the Yahwist who are strong without that sense of
contingency. These are the Great Originals, and they are not many;
Shakespeare and Freud are among them and so is Dickens. Dickens, like
Shakespeare and Freud, had no true precursors, or perhaps it might be
more accurate to say he swallowed up Tobias Smollett rather as
Shakespeare devoured Christopher Marlowe. Originality, or an authentic
freedom from contingency, is Dickens’s salient characteristic as an author.
Since Dickens’s influence has been so immense, even upon writers so
unlikely as Dostoyevski and Kafka, we find it a little difficult now to see at
first how overwhelmingly original he is.
Dickens now constitutes a facticity or contingency that no subsequent
novelist can transcend or evade without the risk of self-maiming. Consider
the difference between two masters of modern fiction, Henry James and
James Joyce. Is not Dickens the difference? Ulysses comes to terms with
Dickens, and earns the exuberance it manifests. Poldy is larger, I think,
than any single figure in Dickens, but he has recognizably Dickensian
qualities. Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors has none, and is the poorer
for it. Part of the excitement of The Princess Casamassima for us must be
Novelists and Novels 105

that, for once, James achieves a Dickensian sense of the outward life, a
sense that is lacking even in The Portrait of a Lady, and that we miss acute-
ly (at least I do) amidst even the most inward splendors of The Wings of the
Dove and The Golden Bowl.
The Personal History of David Copperfield, indeed the most personal and
autobiographical of all Dickens’s novels, has been so influential upon all
subsequent portraits of the artist as a young man that we have to make a
conscious effort to recover our appreciation of the book’s fierce originali-
ty. It is the first therapeutic novel, in part written to heal the author’s self,
or at least to solace permanent anxieties incurred in childhood and youth.
Freud’s esteem for David Copperfield seems inevitable, even if it has led to
a number of unfortunate readings within that unlikely compound oddly
called “Freudian literary criticism.”
Dickens’s biographer Edgar Johnson has traced the evolution of David
Copperfield from an abandoned fragment of autobiography, with its power-
ful but perhaps self-deceived declaration: “I do not write resentfully or
angrily: for I know how all these things have worked together to make me
what I am.” Instead of representing his own parents as being David
Copperfield’s, Dickens displaced them into the Micawbers, a change that
purchased astonishing pathos and charm at the expense of avoiding a per-
sonal pain that might have produced greater meaningfulness. But David
Copperfield was, as Dickens said, his “favourite child,” fulfilling his deep
need to become his own father. Of no other book would he have said: “I
seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.”
Kierkegaard advised us that “he who is willing to do the work gives
birth to his own father,” while Nietzsche even more ironically observed
that “if one hasn’t had a good father, then it is necessary to invent one.”
David Copperfield is more in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s adage, as Dickens
more or less makes himself David’s father. David, an illustrious novelist,
allows himself to narrate his story in the first person. A juxtaposition of the
start and conclusion of the narrative may be instructive:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether


that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was
born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve
o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike,
and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was
declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neigh-
bourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months
106 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

before there was any possibility of our becoming personally


acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and sec-
ondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these
gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of
either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can
show better than my history whether that prediction was verified
or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the question, I
will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inher-
itance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do
not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and
if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is
heartily welcome to keep it.

And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet,


these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly
light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond
them all. And that remains.
I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me.
My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the
dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.
O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close
my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like
the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing
upward!

No adroit reader could prefer the last four paragraphs of David


Copperfield to the first three. The high humor of the beginning is fortu-
nately more typical of the book than the sugary conclusion. Yet the juxta-
position does convey the single rhetorical flaw in Dickens that matters, by
which I do not mean the wild pathos that marks the death of Steerforth, or
the even more celebrated career of the endlessly unfortunate little Em’ly.
If Dickens’s image of voice or mode of representation is “stage fire,” then
his metaphors always will demand the possibility of being staged.
Micawber, Uriah Heep, Steerforth in his life (not at the end) are all of
them triumphs of stage fire, as are Peggotty, Murdstone, Betsey Trotwood,
and even Dora Spenlow. But Agnes is a disaster, and that dreadful “point-
ing upward!” is not to be borne. You cannot stage Agnes, which would not
matter except that she does represent the idealizing and self-mystifying
side of David and so she raises the question, Can you, as a reader, stage
David? How much stage fire got into him? Or, to be hopelessly reductive,
Novelists and Novels 107

has he a will, as Uriah Heep and Steerforth in their very different ways are
wills incarnate?
If there is an aesthetic puzzle in the novel, it is why David has and con-
veys so overwhelming a sense of disordered suffering and early sorrow in
his Murdstone phase, as it were, and before. Certainly the intensity of the
pathos involved is out of all proportion to the fictive experience that comes
through to the reader. Dickens both invested himself in and withdrew
from David, so that something is always missing in the self-representation.
Yet the will—to live, to interpret, to repeat, to write—survives and bur-
geons perpetually. Dickens’s preternatural energy gets into David, and is at
some considerable variance with the diffidence of David’s apparent refusal
to explore his own inwardness. What does mark Dickens’s representation
of David with stage fire is neither the excess of the early sufferings nor the
tiresome idealization of the love for Agnes. It is rather the vocation of nov-
elist, the drive to tell a story, particularly one’s own story, that apparels
David with the fire of what Freud called the drives.
Dickens’s greatness in David Copperfield has little to do with the much
more extraordinary strength that was to manifest itself in Bleak House,
which can compete with Clarissa, Emma, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a
Lady, Women in Love, and Ulysses for the eminence of being the inescapable
novel in the language. David Copperfield is of another order, but it is the
origin of that order, the novelist’s account of how she or he burned
through experience in order to achieve the Second Birth, into the will to
narrate, the storyteller’s destiny.

Hard Times

Hard Times is, for Dickens, a strikingly condensed novel, being about one-
third of the length of David Copperfield and Bleak House, the two master-
pieces that directly preceded it. Astonishing and aesthetically satisfying as
it is, I believe it to be somewhat overpraised by modern criticism, or per-
haps praised for some less than fully relevant reasons. Ruskin and Bernard
Shaw after him admired the book as a testament to Dickens’s conversion
away from a commercialized and industrialized England and back towards
a supposed juster and more humane society. But to like Hard Times because
of its anti-Utilitarian ideology is to confuse the book with Carlyle and
William Morris, as well as with Ruskin and Shaw. The most balanced judg-
ment of the novel is that of Monroe Engel, who observes that “the great-
est virtues of Hard Times are Dickens’s characteristic virtues, but less rich-
ly present in the book than in many others.” Gradgrind is poor stuff, and
is not even an effective parody of Jeremy Bentham. The strength of the
108 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

novel is indeed elsewhere, as we might expect in the theatrical Dickens.


And yet Hard Times is lacking in stage fire; compared to Bleak House,
it possesses only a tiny component of the Sublime. Again, as an instance of
the plain style, the mode of Esther Summerson’s narrative, it is curiously
weak, and has moreover such drab characterizations as Sissy Jupe and
Stephen Blackpool. Indeed, the book’s rhetoric is the most colorless in all
of Dickens’s work. Though, as Engel insisted, many of Dickens’s authori-
al virtues are present, the book lacks the preternatural exuberance that
makes Dickens unique among all novelists. Has it any qualities of its own
to recommend our devotion?
I would suggest that the start of any critical wisdom about Hard Times
is to dismiss every Marxist or other moral interpretation of the book. Yes,
Dickens’s heart was accurate, even if his notion of Benthamite social phi-
losophy was not, and a great novelist’s overt defense of imagination cannot
fail to move us. Consider however the outrageous first chapter of Hard
Times, “The One Thing Needful”:

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls noth-
ing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else,
and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of rea-
soning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any serv-
ice to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own
children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these chil-
dren. Stick to Facts, sir!”
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-
room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observa-
tions by underscoring every sentence with a line on the school-
master’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square
wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his
eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshad-
owed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s
mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was
helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dicta-
torial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bris-
tled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the
wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the
crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room
for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage,
square coat, square legs, square shoulders—nay, his very neck-
cloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodat-
ing grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was—all helped the emphasis.
Novelists and Novels 109

“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown per-
son present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the
inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order,
ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they
were full to the brim.

Gradgrind is doubtless Dickens’s ultimate revenge upon his own


school sufferings; Gradgrind might be called Murdstone run wild, except
that Murdstone stays within the circle of caricature, whereas Gradgrind’s
will is mad, is a drive towards death. And that is where, I now think, the
peculiar aesthetic strength of Hard Times is to be located. The novel sur-
vives as phantasmagoria or nightmare, and hardly as a societal or concep-
tual bad dream. What goes wrong in it is what Freud called “family
romances,” which become family horrors. Critics always have noted how
really dreadful family relations are in Hard Times, as they so frequently are
elsewhere in Dickens. A particular power is manifest if we analyze a pas-
sage near the conclusion of the penultimate chapter of the first book of the
novel, chapter 15, “Father and Daughter”:

“Louisa,” returned her father, “it appears to me that nothing


can be plainer. Confining yourself rigidly to Fact, the question of
Fact you state to yourself is: Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to marry
him? Yes, he does. The sole remaining question then is: Shall I
marry him? I think nothing can be plainer than that?”
“Shall I marry him?” repeated Louisa, with great deliberation.
“Precisely. And it is satisfactory to me, as your father, my clear
Louisa, to know that you do not come to the consideration of that
question with the previous habits of mind, and habits of life, that
belong to many young women.”
“No, father,” she returned, “I do not.”
“I now leave you to judge for yourself,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “I
have stated the case, as such cases are usually stated among practi-
cal minds; I have stated it, as the case of your mother and myself was
stated in its time. The rest, my dear Louisa, is for you to decide.”
From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he
now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her
in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in
her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and
give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he
must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for
110 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle
essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of alge-
bra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even alge-
bra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a
leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hard-
ened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless
depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that
are drowned there.
Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently
towards the town, that he said, at length: “Are you consulting the
chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?”
“There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous
smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!” she
answered, turning quickly.
“Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the application of
the remark.” To do him justice he did not, at all.
She passed it away with a slight motion of her hand, and con-
centrating her attention upon him again, said, “Father, I have
often thought that life is very short.”—This was so distinctly one
of his subjects that he interposed.
“It is short, no doubt, my dear. Still, the average duration of
human life is proved to have increased of late years. The calcula-
tions of various life assurance and annuity offices, among other
figures which cannot go wrong, have established the fact.”
“I speak of my own life, father.”
“O indeed? Still,” said Mr. Gradgrind, “I need not point out to
you, Louisa, that it is governed by the laws which govern lives in
the aggregate.”
“While it lasts, I would wish to do the little I can, and the lit-
tle I am fit for. What does it matter?”
Mr. Gradgrind seemed rather at a loss to understand the last
four words; replying, “How, matter? What matter, my dear?”
“Mr. Bounderby,” she went on in a steady, straight way, with-
out regarding this, “asks me to marry him. The question I have to
ask myself is, shall I marry him? That is so, father, is it not? You
have told me so, father. Have you not?”
“Certainly, my dear.”
“Let it be so. Since Mr. Bounderby likes to take me thus, I am
satisfied to accept his proposal. Tell him, father, as soon as you
please, that this was my answer. Repeat it, word for word, if you
can, because I should wish him to know what I said.”
Novelists and Novels 111

“It is quite right, my dear,” retorted her father approvingly, “to


be exact. I will observe your very proper request. Have you any
wish in reference to the period of your marriage, my child?”
“None, father. What does it matter?”
Mr. Gradgrind had drawn his chair a little nearer to her, and
taken her hand. But, her repetition of these words seemed to
strike with some little discord on his ear. He paused to look at her,
and, still holding her hand, said:
“Louisa, I have not considered it essential to ask you one ques-
tion, because the possibility implied in it appeared to me to be too
remote. But perhaps I ought to do so. You have never entertained
in secret any other proposal?”
“Father,” she returned, almost scornfully, “what other propos-
al can have been made to me? Whom have I seen? Where have I
been? What are my heart’s experiences?”
“My dear Louisa,” returned Mr. Gradgrind, reassured and sat-
isfied. “You correct me justly. I merely wished to discharge my
duty.”
“What do I know, father,” said Louisa in her quiet manner, “of
tastes and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of
my nature in which such light things might have been nourished?
What escape have I had from problems that could be demonstrat-
ed, and realities that could be grasped?” As she said it, she uncon-
sciously closed her hand, as if upon a solid object, and slowly
opened it as though she were releasing dust or ash.

Caricature here has leaped into Ruskin’s “stage fire.” Gradgrind, quite
mad, nevertheless achieves the wit of asking Louisa whether she is con-
sulting the oracular vapors of the Coketown chimneys. Her magnificent,
“Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!” is more than a prophe-
cy of the return of the repressed. It prophesies also the exuberance of
Dickens himself, which comes flooding forth in the obvious yet grand
metaphor a page later, when poor Louisa closes her hand, as if upon a gras-
pable reality, and slowly opens it to disclose that her heart, like that of
Tennyson’s protagonist in Maud, is a handful of dust.
That is the true, dark power of Hard Times. Transcending Dickens’s
social vision, or his polemic for imagination, is his naked return to the
domain of the drives, Eros and Death. The novel ends with an address to
the reader that necessarily is far more equivocal than Dickens can have
intended:
112 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Dear Reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields
of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit
with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires
turn grey and cold.

Presumably, our imaginative escape from Gradgrindism into poetry will


lighten our bosoms, even as we watch the reality principle overtake us. But
the power of Dickens’s rhetoric is in those gray and cold ashes, handfuls of
dust that gather everywhere in the pages of Hard Times. Gradgrind, or the
world without imagination, fails as a satire upon Utilitarianism, but triumphs
frighteningly as a representation of the drive beyond the pleasure principle.

Bleak House

Bleak House may not be “the finest literary work the nineteenth century
produced in England,” as Geoffrey Tillotson called it in 1946. A century
that gave us The Prelude and Wordsworth’s major crisis lyrics, Blake’s
Milton and Jerusalem, Byron’s Don Juan, the principal poems of Shelley,
Keats, Tennyson, and Browning, and novels such as Pride and Prejudice,
Emma, Middlemarch, and Dickens’s own Hard Times and Our Mutual
Friend, is an era of such literary plenitude that a single choice is necessari-
ly highly problematic. Yet there is now something close to critical agree-
ment that Bleak House is Dickens’s most complex and memorable single
achievement. W. J. Harvey usefully sketches just how formidably the novel
is patterned:

Bleak House is for Dickens a unique and elaborate experiment in


narration and plot composition. It is divided into two intermin-
gled and roughly concurrent stories; Esther Summerson’s first-
person narrative and an omniscient narrative told consistently in
the historic present. The latter takes up thirty-four chapters;
Esther has one less. Her story, however, occupies a good deal
more than half the novel. The reader who checks the distribution
of these two narratives against the original part issues will hardly
discern any significant pattern or correlation. Most parts contain
a mixture of the two stories; one part is narrated entirely by Esther
and five parts entirely by the omniscient author. Such a check
does, however, support the view that Dickens did not, as is some-
times supposed, use serial publication in the interest of crude sus-
pense. A sensational novelist, for example, might well have ended
a part issue with chapter 31; Dickens subdues the drama by adding
Novelists and Novels 113

another chapter to the number. The obvious exception to this


only proves the rule; in the final double number the suspense of
Bucket’s search for Lady Dedlock is heightened by cutting back to
the omniscient narrative and the stricken Sir Leicester. In gener-
al, however, Dickens’s control of the double narrative is far richer
and subtler than this.

I would add to Harvey the critical observation that Dickens’s own nar-
rative will in “his” thirty-four chapters is a will again different in kind from
the will to tell her story of the admirable Esther Summerson. Dickens’s (or
the omniscient, historical present narrator’s) metaphor of representation is
one of “stage fire”: wild, free, unconditioned, incessant with the force of
Freud’s domain of those grandly indefinite frontier concepts, the drives.
Esther’s mode of representation is certainly not flat or insipid; for all of her
monumental repressions, Esther finally seems to me the most mysterious-
ly complex and profound personage in Bleak House. Her narrative is not so
much plain style as it is indeed repressed in the precise Freudian sense of
“repression,” whose governing metaphor, in Esther’s prose as in Freud’s, is
flight from, rather than a pushing down or pushing under. Esther fre-
quently forgets, purposefully though “unconsciously,” what she cannot
bear to remember, and much of her narrative is her strong defense against
the force of the past. Esther may not appear to change as she goes from lit-
tle girl to adult, but that is because the rhythm of her psyche, unlike
Dickens’s own, is one of unfolding rather than development. She is
Dickens’s Muse, what Whitman would have called his “Fancy,” as in the
great death-lyric “Good-bye, my Fancy!” or what Stevens would have
called Dickens’s “Interior Paramour.”
Contrast a passage of Esther’s story with one of Dickens’s own narra-
tive, from the end of chapter 56, “Pursuit,” and toward the close of the
next chapter, “Esther’s Narrative”:

Mr. Jarndyce, the only person up in the house, is just going to bed;
rises from his book, on hearing the rapid ringing at the bell; and
comes down to the door in his dressing-gown.
“Don’t be alarmed sir.” In a moment his visitor is confidential
with him in the hall, has shut the door, and stands with his hand
upon the lock. “I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you before.
Inspector Bucket. Look at that handkerchief, sir, Miss Esther
Summerson’s. Found it myself put away in a drawer of Lady
Dedlock’s, quarter of an hour ago. Not a moment to lose. Matter
of life or death. You know. Lady Dedlock?”
114 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

“Yes.”
“There has been a discovery there, to-day. Family affairs have
come out. Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has had a fit—apoplexy
or paralysis—and couldn’t be brought to, and precious time has
been lost. Lady Dedlock disappeared this afternoon, and left a let-
ter for him that looks bad. Run your eye over it. Here it is!”
Mr. Jarndyce having read it, asks him what he thinks? “I don’t
know. It looks like suicide. Anyways, there’s more and more dan-
ger, every minute, of its drawing to that. I’d give a hundred pound
an hour to have got the start of the present time. Now, Mr.
Jarndyce, I am employed by Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, to
follow her and find her—to save her, and take her his forgiveness.
I have money and full power, but I want something else. I want
Miss Summerson.”
Mr. Jarndyce, in a troubled voice, repeats “Miss Summerson?”
“Now, Mr. Jarndyce”; Mr. Bucket has read his face with the
greatest attention all along: “I speak to you as a gentleman of a
humane heart, and under such pressing circumstances as don’t
often happen. If ever delay was dangerous, it’s dangerous now; and
if ever you couldn’t afterwards forgive yourself for causing it, this
is the time. Eight or ten hours, worth, as I tell you, a hundred
pound apiece at least, have been lost since Lady Dedlock disap-
peared. I am charged to find her. I am Inspector Bucket. Besides
all the rest that’s heavy on her, she has upon her, as she believes,
suspicion of murder. If I follow her alone, she, being in ignorance
of what Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, has communicated to me,
may be driven to desperation. But if I follow her in company with
a young lady, answering to the description of a young lady that she
has a tenderness for—I ask no question, and I say no more than
that—she will give me credit for being friendly. Let me come up
with her, and be able to have the hold upon her of putting that
young lady for’ard, and I’ll save her and prevail with her if she is
alive. Let me come up with her alone—a harder matter—and I’ll
do my best; but I don’t answer for what the best may be. Time
flies; it’s getting on for one o’clock. When one strikes, there’s
another hour gone; and it’s worth a thousand pound now, instead
of a hundred.”
This is all true, and the pressing nature of the case cannot be
questioned. Mr. Jarndyce begs him to remain there, while he
speaks to Miss Summerson. Mr. Bucket says he will; but acting on
his usual principle, does no such thing—following up-stairs
Novelists and Novels 115

instead, and keeping his man in sight. So he remains, dodging and


lurking about in the gloom of the staircase while they confer. In a
very little time, Mr. Jarndyce comes down, and tells him that Miss
Summerson will join him directly, and place herself under his pro-
tection, to accompany him where he pleases. Mr. Bucket, satisfied,
expresses high approval; and awaits her coming, at the door.
There, he mounts a high tower in his mind, and looks out far
and wide. Many solitary figures he perceives, creeping through
the streets; many solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and
lying under haystacks. But the figure that he seeks is not among
them. Other solitaries he perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking
over; and in shadowed places down by the river’s level; and a dark,
dark, shapeless object drifting with the tide, more solitary than all,
clings with a drowning hold on his attention.
Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the
handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able, with an enchant-
ed power, to bring before him the place where she found it, and the
night landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child,
would he descry her there? On the waste, where the brick-kilns are
burning with a pale blue flare; where the straw-roofs of the
wretched huts in which the bricks are made, are being scattered by
the wind; where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in
which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, looks like an
instrument of human torture; traversing this deserted blighted
spot, there is a lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by
the snow and driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from
all companionship. It is the figure of a woman, too; but it is miser-
ably dressed, and no such clothes ever came through the hall, and
out at the great door, of the Dedlock mansion.

The transparent windows with the fire and light, looking so bright
and warm from the cold darkness out of doors, were soon gone,
and again we were crushing and churning the loose snow. We
went on with toil enough; but the dismal roads were not much
worse than they had been, and the stage was only nine miles. My
companion smoking on the box—I had thought at the last inn of
begging him to do so, when I saw him standing at a great fire in a
comfortable cloud of tobacco—was as vigilant as ever; and as
quickly down and up again, when we came to any human abode or
any human creature. He had lighted his little dark lantern, which
seemed to be a favourite with him, for we had lamps to the car-
116 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

riage; and every now and then he turned it upon me, to see that I
was doing well. There was a folding-window to the carriage-head,
but I never closed it, for it seemed like shutting out hope.
We came to the end of the stage, and still the lost trace was not
recovered. I looked at him anxiously when we stopped to change;
but I knew by his yet graver face, as he stood watching the ostlers,
that he had heard nothing. Almost in an instant afterwards, as I
leaned back in my seat, he looked in, with his lighted lantern in his
hand, an excited and quite different man.
“What is it?” said I, starting. “Is she here?”
“No, no. Don’t deceive yourself, my dear. Nobody’s here. But
I’ve got it!”
The crystallised snow was in his eyelashes, in his hair, lying in
ridges on his dress. He had to shake it from his face, and get his
breath before he spoke to me.
“Now, Miss Summerson,” said he, beating his finger on the
apron, “don’t you be disappointed at what I’m a going to do. You
know me. I’m Inspector Bucket, and you can trust me. We’ve
come a long way; never mind. Four horses out there for the next
stage up! Quick!”
There was a commotion in the yard, and a man carne running
out of the stables to know “if he meant up or down?” “Up, I tell
you! Up! Ain’t it English? Up!”
“Up?” said I, astonished. “To London! Are we going back?”
“Miss Summerson,” he answered, “back. Straight back as a die.
You know me. Don’t be afraid. I’ll follow the other, by G—.”
“The other?” I repeated. “Who?”
“You called her Jenny, didn’t you? I’ll follow her. Bring those
two pair out here, for a crown a man. Wake up, some of you!”
“You will not desert this lady we are in search of; you will not
abandon her on such a night, and in such a state of mind as I know
her to be in!” said I, in an agony, and grasping his hand.
“You are right, my dear, I won’t. But I’ll follow the other. Look
alive here with them horses. Send a man for’ard in the saddle to
the next stage, and let him send another for’ard again, and order
four on, up, right through. My darling, don’t you be afraid!”
These orders, and the way in which he ran about the yard, urg-
ing them, caused a general excitement that was scarcely less bewil-
dering to me than the sudden change. But in the height of the:
confusion, a mounted man galloped away to order the relays, and
our horses were put to with great speed.
Novelists and Novels 117

“My dear,” said Mr. Bucket, jumping up to his seat, and look-
ing in again—“you’ll excuse me if I’m too familiar—don’t you fret
and worry yourself no more than you can help. I say nothing else
at present; but you know me, my dear; now, don’t you?”
I endeavoured to say that I knew he was far more capable than
I of deciding what we ought to do; but was he sure that this was
right? Could I not go forward by myself in search of—I grasped
his hand again in my distress, and whispered it to him—of my own
mother.
“My dear,” he answered, “I know, I know, and would I put you
wrong, do you think? Inspector Bucket. Now you know me, don’t
you?”
What could I say but yes!
“Then you keep up as good a heart as you can, and you rely
upon me for standing by you, no less than by Sir Leicester
Dedlock, Baronet. Now, are you right there?”
“All right, sir!”
“Off she goes, then. And get on, my lads!”
We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had
come; tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow, as if they were
torn up by a waterwheel.

Both passages are extraordinary, by any standards, and certainly


“Pursuit” has far more stage fire than “Esther’s Narrative,” but this time-
lier repressive shield, in part, is broken through, and a fire leaps forth out
of her. If we start with “Pursuit,” however, we are likelier to see what it is
that returns from the repressed in Esther, returns under the sign of nega-
tion (as Freud prophesied), so that what comes back is primarily cognitive,
while the affective aspect of the repression persists. We can remember the
opening of David Copperfield, where Dickens in his persona as David dis-
avows the gift of second sight attributed to him by the wise women and
gossips. Inspector Bucket, at the conclusion of the “Pursuit” chapter, is
granted a great vision, a preternatural second sight of Esther’s lost moth-
er, Lady Dedlock. What Bucket sees is stage fire at its most intense, the
novelist’s will to tell become an absolute vision of the will. Mounting a high
tower in his mind, Bucket (who thus becomes Dickens’s authorial will)
looks out, far and wide, and sees the truth: “a dark, dark, shapeless object
drifting with the tide, more solitary than all,” which “clings with a drown-
ing hold on his attention.” That “drowning hold” leads to the further
vision: “where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the
gaunt blind horse goes round all day.” I suspect that Dickens here has a
118 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

debt to Browning’s great romance, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower


Came,” where another apparent instrument of human torture in a desert-
ed, blighted spot, is seen by a companionless figure as being in association
with a starving blind horse, cast out from the Devil’s stud, who provokes in
Browning’s narrator the terrible outcry that he never saw a beast he hated
so, because: “He must be wicked to deserve such pain.”
The ensuing chapter of “Esther’s Narrative” brilliantly evokes the
cognitive return of Esther’s acknowledgment of her mother, under the sign
of a negation of past affect. Here the narrative vision proceeds, not in the
sublime mode of Bucket’s extraordinary second sight, but in the grave,
meditative lyricism that takes us first to a tentative return from uncon-
scious flight through an image of pursuit of the fleeing, doomed mother:
“The transparent windows with the fire and light, looking so bright and
warm from the cold darkness out of doors, were soon gone, and again we
were crushing and churning the loose snow.” That “crushing and churn-
ing” images the breaking of the repressive shield, and Dickens shrewdly
ends the chapter with Esther’s counterpart to Bucket’s concluding vision of
a Browningesque demonic water mill, torturing consciousness into a
return from flight. Esther whispers to Bucket that she desires to go for-
ward by herself in search of her own mother, and the dark pursuit goes on
in the sinister metaphor of the sleet and thawing snow, shield of repression,
being torn up by a waterwheel that recirculates the meaning of memory’s
return, even as it buries part of the pains of abandonment by the mother
once more: “We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had
come; tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow, as if they were torn up
by a waterwheel.”
It is a terrifying triumph of Dickens’s art that, when “Esther’s
Narrative” resumes, in chapter 59, we know inevitably that we are headed
straight for an apocalyptic image of what Shakespeare, in King Lear, calls
“the promised end” or “image of that horror,” here not the corpse of the
daughter, but of the mother. Esther goes, as she must, to be the first to
touch and to see, and with no affect whatsoever, unveils the truth:

I passed on to the gate, and stooped down. I lifted the heavy head,
put the long dank hair aside, and turned the face. And it was my
mother, cold and dead.
N O V E L I S T S
Anthony Trollope

A N D
(1815–1882)

N O V E L S
Barchester Towers and The Warden

THE WARDEN AND BARCHESTER TOWERS ARE VERY DIFFERENT NOVELS, BUT
forever linked by continuities of composition, contest, and personages.
Unlike The Warden, Barchester Towers essentially is a comic novel. Trollope
is hardly a novelist whom we can characterize in simple terms, because
there are wholly equivocal elements in his narrative art. He can be very
funny indeed and I agree with Christopher Herbert’s contention that
Trollope subtly dissented from his era’s overt deprecation of fleshly and
worldly pleasures. But Trollope was scarcely a hedonist or a vitalist and his
dissent was limited; not half-hearted, but rhetorically muted. You have to
read him with an intense awareness of tone, as Herbert does, in order to
hear his comic endorsement of desire and to apprehend that he is not a sen-
timentalist in the ostensible religion of married love that is generally
imposed upon him. Herbert persuades me, as against the views of such crit-
ics as J. Hillis Miller and Walter M. Kendrick, who threaten unwittingly to
drown Trollope in a bathos he himself had fought against. Yet there is a
missing quality in Trollope, a zest or gusto that would recommend his more
interesting immoralists to us unreservedly.
C.P. Snow remarked that Trollope was “both skeptical and secretive
and it seems not unlikely that, alone with himself, he came to believe ratti-
er little.” That is convincing to me, since neither the theology nor the
national church politics of The Warden and Barchester Towers greatly con-
cern Trollope, whose interest is rather in the agon of personalities. Novels,
as everyone agrees, trade in morals and manners, but the puzzle of Trollope
is that we never quite can establish his stance as a moralist, if only because
it is more evasive and more personal than it presents itself as being. Snow

119
120 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

usefully reminds us that, a decade after Barchester Towers, Trollope stood as


a Liberal candidate for Parliament, a venture consonant with lifelong
Whiggish sympathies on Trollope’s part. In Barchester Towers, Trollope
clearly favors the Tory, High Church group of the archdeacon and his
friends over the Liberal Evangelicals: Bishop Proudie, the haughty Mrs.
Proudie, the reprehensible chaplain Slope. Snow calls this a crossing of
Trollope’s vote, but I suppose instead we might call this Trollope’s own
version of comic realism, inherited by him from his master, Thackeray.
More than Thackeray, Trollope seems to know implicitly that “comic real-
ism” is a kind of oxymoron. Jacobean comedy, which Herbert demon-
strates to be one of Trollope’s prime sources, can be quite phantasmagoric,
if not as wildly so as Jacobean tragedy. Fletcher, Massinger, and Middleton
at once excited Trollope’s overt moral disapproval and his deeper interest,
since Fletcher in particular was a quarry for Trollope, as Herbert observes:

It is easy to extract from Trollope’s annotations a typical Victorian


condemnation of the vein of sexual scandal that runs through
comedy; Jeremy Collier himself was hardly more indignant than
Trollope at the pervading immorality of the comic stage. Yet
major qualifications must at once be made to such a comparison.
For one thing, Trollope constantly declares that even the smutti-
est and most “disgusting” comedies, such as Beaumont’s and
Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta or Fletcher’s A Wife for a Month, are
in fact highly entertaining in spite of themselves. He condemns
the bawdy-tongued heroines of Fletcher’s The Wild-Goose-Chase,
then praises this superlative comedy as “an excellent play, full of
wit, with much language almost worthy of Shakespeare.” The var-
ious characters, he says, “are kept up with such infinite life that the
piece is charming to read, and must have charmed when acted”—
an equation of “charm” with “life,” incidentally, that goes to the
heart of our theme. Divided judgments like these highlight the
obvious paradox in the spectacle of a prudish Victorian moralist
who endlessly describes himself as disgusted and repelled by
Jacobean comedy, yet who reads it almost insatiably for decades,
and shows, indeed, a special fascination for the very playwright he
condemns most strongly for his lewdness (for Trollope read
Fletcher’s huge body of work twice, first in the early 1850s—this
being the only reading project recorded for these dates—then
again from 1869 to 1874). One need not be a Freudian analyst to
draw the conclusion that Trollope was keenly attracted to the
“indecency” of comedy and to the enfranchisement it offered
Novelists and Novels 121

from the straitjacket of the Victorian cult of sexual purity, partic-


ularly with reference to women. His fulminations against it, we
may assume, are in direct proportion to his instinctive attraction
toward it.

The oddest aspect of Trollope in this matter is that he himself aug-


ments the repression, beyond even the call of his society, and then the
repressed returns in him, with necessarily greater force. I would revise
Herbert only to that degree; Trollope is far more prudish than his precur-
sor Thackeray and subsequently he exceeds Thackeray in subverting soci-
etal expectations. Since Trollope, however, had internalized those expecta-
tions, he necessarily subverts himself. Such a narrative process is consider-
ably more difficult to apprehend than is Thackeray’s ambivalent stance,
which at once satirizes Vanity Fair yet also stays well within it. There is a
repressed Jacobean vitalist in Trollope, but mostly he maintained the
repression.
Barchester Towers is a social comedy whose realism is consistent if a lit-
tle uneasy. Kafka partly derived from Dickens, monumental fantasist; we
could not envision Kafka reading, and being influenced by, Trollope. Yet
Trollope’s most surprising talent is his inventiveness, which can be simul-
taneously outrageous and persuasive, like social reality itself. The glory of
Barchester Towers, and my own favorite moment in Victorian fiction, is the
superb apotheosis at Mrs. Proudie’s reception, when the astonishing Bertie
Stanhope propels the sofa of his invalid sister, the grand vamp La Signora
Madeline Vesey Neroni, on its epic voyage into the proud torso of Mrs.
Proudie:

“They’ve got this sofa into the worst possible part of the room;
suppose we move it. Take care, Madeline.”
The sofa had certainly been so placed that those who were
behind it found great difficulty in getting out; there was but a nar-
row gangway, which one person could stop. This was a bad
arrangement, and one which Bertie thought it might be well to
improve.
“Take care, Madeline,” said he, and turning to the fat rector,
added, “Just help me with a slight push.”
The rector’s weight was resting on the sofa and unwittingly lent
all its impetus to accelerate and increase the motion which Bertie
intentionally originated. The sofa rushed from its moorings and
ran half-way into the middle of the room. Mrs. Proudie was stand-
ing with Mr. Slope in front of the signora, and had been trying to
122 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

be condescending and sociable; but she was not in the very best of
tempers, for she found that, whenever she spoke to the lady, the
lady replied by speaking to Mr. Slope. Mr. Slope was a favourite,
no doubt, but Mrs. Proudie had no idea of being less thought of
than the chaplain. She was beginning to be stately, stiff, and
offended, when unfortunately the castor of the sofa caught itself
in her lace train and carried away there is no saying how much of
her garniture. Gathers were heard to go, stitches to crack, plaits to
fly open, flounces were seen to fall, and breadths to expose them-
selves; a long ruin of rent lace disfigured the carpet and still clung
to the vile wheel on which the sofa moved.
So, when a granite battery is raised, excellent to the eyes of war-
faring men, is its strength and symmetry admired. It is the work
of years. Its neat embrasures, its finished parapets, its casemated
stories show all the skill of modern science. But, anon, a small
spark is applied to the treacherous fusee—a cloud of dust arises to
the heavens—and then nothing is to be seen but dirt and dust and
ugly fragments.
We know what was the wrath of Juno when her beauty was
despised. We know to what storms of passion even celestial minds
can yield. As Juno may have looked at Paris on Mount Ida, so did
Mrs. Proudie look on Ethelbert Stanhope when he pushed the leg
of the sofa into her lace train.
“Oh, you idiot, Bertie!” said the signora, seeing what had been
done and what were to be the consequences.
“Idiot!” re-echoed Mrs. Proudie, as though the word were not
half strong enough to express the required meaning; “I’ll let him
know—” and then looking round to learn, at a glance, the worst,
she saw that at present it behoved her to collect the scattered débris
of her dress.
Bertie, when he saw what he had done, rushed over the sofa
and threw himself on one knee before the offended lady. His
object, doubtless, was to liberate the torn lace from the castor, but
he looked as though he were imploring pardon from a goddess.
“Unhand it, sir!” said Mrs. Proudie. From what scrap of dra-
matic poetry she had extracted the word cannot be said, but it
must have rested on her memory and now seemed opportunely
dignified for the occasion.
“I’ll fly to the looms of the fairies to repair the damage, if you’ll
only forgive me,” said Ethelbert, still on his knees.
“Unhand it, sir!” said Mrs. Proudie with redoubled emphasis
Novelists and Novels 123

and all but furious wrath. This allusion to the fairies was a direct
mockery and intended to turn her into ridicule. So at least it
seemed to her. “Unhand it, sir!” she almost screamed.
“It’s not me; it’s the cursed sofa,” said Bertie, looking implor-
ingly in her face and holding up both his hands to show that he
was not touching her belongings, but still remaining on his knees.
Hereupon the signora laughed; not loud, indeed, but yet audi-
bly. And as the tigress bereft of her young will turn with equal
anger on any within reach, so did Mrs. Proudie turn upon her
female guest.
“Madam!” she said—and it is beyond the power of prose to tell
of the fire which flashed from her eyes.
The signora stared her full in the face for a moment, and then
turning to her brother said playfully, “Bertie, you idiot, get up.”
By this time the bishop, and Mr. Slope, and her three daugh-
ters were around her, and had collected together the wide ruins of
her magnificence. The girls fell into circular rank behind their
mother, and thus following her and carrying out the fragments,
they left the reception-rooms in a manner not altogether devoid
of dignity. Mrs. Proudie had to retire and re-array herself.
As soon as the constellation had swept by, Ethelbert rose from
his knees and, turning with mock anger to the fat rector, said:
“After all it was your doing, sir—not mine. But perhaps you are
waiting for preferment, and so I bore it.”

Were I the New Longinus, composing Upon Strong Writing or On the


Nov Sublime, I would employ this as one of the greatest comic scenes in lit-
erature, when read within its full contest in Barchester Towers. Trollope
somewhere declares that “the sublime may be mingled with the realistic, if
the writer has the power.” The creator of Bertie Stanhope—who cheerful-
ly has failed at every possible and improbable career: the Anglican Church,
the law, English and German universities, painter in Rome, the Jesuits,
Jewish convert in Palestine, sculptor in Carrara, but who remains an
absolute original—now gives that creation his finest moment, in the sofa
debacle. The comparison of Mrs. Proudie’s dress to the granite battery is
merely perfect, since dress and granite contain the same entity, aggressive
and hostile. The threefold “Unhand it, sir!” will not be matched for forty
years, until Wilde’s Lady Bracknell commands Jack: “Rise, sir, from this
semi-recumbent posture,” in one of the few literary works until the early
Evelyn Waugh that might be worthy of accommodating Bertie Stanhope.
But neither Wilde nor Waugh has anything like the military or naval
124 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

maneuver in which the Proudie girls “fell into circular rank behind their
mother, and thus following her and carrying out the fragments, they left
the reception-rooms in a manner not altogether devoid of dignity.”
Trollope’s triumph, more original than we now can realize, has had many
imitators since, but this mode of comic disaster remains very much his
own.
N O V E L I S T S
Charlotte Brontë

A N D
(1816–1855)

N O V E L S
I

THE THREE BRONTË SISTERS—CHARLOTTE, EMILY JANE, AND ANNE—ARE


unique literary artists whose works resemble one another’s far more than they
do the works of writers before or since. Charlotte’s compelling novel Jane
Eyre and her three lesser yet strong narratives—The Professor, Shirley,
Villette—form the most extensive achievement of the sisters, but critics and
common readers alike set even higher the one novel of Emily Jane’s,
Wuthering Heights, and a handful of her lyrical poems. Anne’s two novels—
Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—remain highly readable, although
dwarfed by Jane Eyre and the authentically sublime Wuthering Heights.
Between them, the Brontës can be said to have invented a reltively new
genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron’s poet-
ry and by his myth and personality, but going back also, more remotely yet
as definitely, to the Gothic novel and to the Elizabethan drama. In a defi-
nite, if difficult to establish sense, the heirs of the Brontës include Thomas
Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. There is a harsh vitalism in the Brontës that
finds its match in the Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love, though
the comparison is rendered problematic by Lawrence’s moral zeal,
enchantingly absent from the Brontës’ literary cosmos.
The aesthetic puzzle of the Brontës has less to do with the mature
transformations of their vision of Byron into Rochester and Heathcliff,
than with their earlier fantasy-life and its literature, and the relation of that
life and literature to its hero and precursor, George Gordon, Lord Byron.
At his rare worst and silliest, Byron has nothing like this scene from

125
126 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Charlotte Brontë’s “Caroline Vernon,” where Caroline confronts the


Byronic Duke of Zamorna:

The Duke spoke again in a single blunt and almost coarse sen-
tence, compressing what remained to be said, “If I were a beard-
ed Turk, Caroline, I would take you to my harem.” His deep voice
as he uttered this, his high featured face, and dark, large eye burn-
ing bright with a spark from the depths of Gehenna, struck
Caroline Vernon with a thrill of nameless dread. Here he was, the
man Montmorency had described to her. All at once she knew
him. Her guardian was gone, something terrible sat in his place.

Byron died his more-or-less heroic death at Missolonghi in Greece on


April 19, 1824, aged thirty-six years and three months, after having set an
impossible paradigm for authors that has become what the late Nelson
Algren called “Hemingway all the way,” in a mode still being exploited by
Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and some of their younger peers. Charlotte
was eight, Emily Jane six, and Anne four when the Noble Lord died and
when his cult gorgeously flowered, dominating their girlhood and their
young womanhood. Byron’s passive-aggressive sexuality—at once sado-
masochistic, homoerotic, incestuous, and ambivalently narcissistic—clear-
ly sets the pattern for the ambiguously erotic universes of Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights. What Schopenhauer named (and deplored) as the Will
to Live, and Freud subsequently posited as the domain of the drives, is the
cosmos of the Brontës, as it would come to be of Hardy and Lawrence.
Byron rather than Schopenhauer is the source of the Brontës’ vision of the
Will to Live, but the Brontës add to Byron what his inverted Calvinism
only partly accepted, the Protestant will proper, a heroic zest to assert one’s
own election, one’s place in the hierarchy of souls.
Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw do not fit into the grand array of
heroines of the Protestant will that commences with Richardson’s Clarissa
Harlowe and goes through Austen’s Emma Woodhouse and Fanny Price
to triumph in George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Henry James’s Isabel
Archer. They are simply too wild and Byronic, too High Romantic, to keep
such company. But we can see them with Hardy’s Tess and, even more, his
Eustacia Vye, and with Lawrence’s Gudrun and Ursula. Their version of
the Protestant will stems from the Romantic reading of Milton, but large-
ly in its Byronic dramatization, rather than its more dialectical and subtle
analyses in Blake and Shelley, and its more normative condemnation in
Coleridge and in the Wordsworth of The Borderers.
Novelists and Novels 127

Jane Eyre

II

The Byronism of Rochester in Jane Eyre is enhanced because the


narrative is related in the first person by Jane Eyre herself, who is very
much an overt surrogate for Charlotte Brontë. As Rochester remarks,
Jane is indomitable; as Jane says, she is altogether “a free human being
with an independent will.” That will is fiercest in its passion for
Rochester, undoubtedly because the passion for her crucial precursor is
doubly ambivalent; Byron is both the literary father to a strong daugh-
ter, and the idealized object of her erotic drive. To Jane, Rochester’s first
appearance is associated not only with the animal intensities of his horse
and dog, but with the first of his maimings. When Jane reclaims him at
the novel’s conclusion, he is left partly blinded and partly crippled. I do
not think that we are to apply the Freudian reduction that Rochester has
been somehow castrated, even symbolically, nor need we think of him as
a sacrificed Samson figure, despite the author’s allusions to Milton’s
Samson Agonistes. But certainly he has been rendered dependent upon
Jane, and he has been tamed into domestic virtue and pious sentiment,
in what I am afraid must be regarded as Charlotte Brontë’s vengeance
upon Byron. Even as Jane Eyre cannot countenance a sense of being in
any way inferior to anyone whatsoever, Charlotte Brontë could not
allow Byron to be forever beyond her. She could acknowledge, with fine
generosity, “that I regard Mr. Thackeray as the first of modern masters,
and as the legitimate high priest of Truth; I study him accordingly with
reverence.” But Vanity Fair is hardly the seedbed of Jane Eyre, and the
amiable and urbane Thackeray was not exactly a prototype for
Rochester.
Charlotte Brontë, having properly disciplined Rochester, forgave him
his Byronic past, as in some comments upon him in one of her letters (to
W.S. Williams, August 14, 1848):

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is


neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs,
when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a
time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most
men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He
is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wis-
dom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth
foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is
128 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour, but only mellows him.
Such at least was the character I meant to portray.

Poor Rochester! If that constituted an accurate critical summary, then


who would want to read the novel? It will hardly endear me to feminist
critics if I observe that much of the literary power of Jane Eyre results from
its authentic sadism in representing the very masculine Rochester as a vic-
tim of Charlotte Brontë’s will-to-power over the beautiful Lord Byron. I
partly dissent, with respect, from the judgment in this regard of our best
feminist critics, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar:

It seems not to have been primarily the coarseness and sexuality of


Jane Eyre which shocked Victorian reviewers ... but ... its “anti-
Christian” refusal to accept the forms, customs, and standards of
society—in short, its rebellious feminism. They were disturbed
not so much by the proud Byronic sexual energy of Rochester as
by the Byronic pride and passion of Jane herself.

Byronic passion, being an ambiguous entity, is legitimately present


in Jane herself as a psychosexual aggressivity turned both against the self
and against others. Charlotte Brontë, in a mode between those of
Schopenhauer and Freud, knows implicitly that Jane Eyre’s drive to
acknowledge no superior to herself is precisely on the frontier between
the psychical and the physical. Rochester is the outward realm that must
be internalized, and Jane’s introjection of him does not leave him wholly
intact. Gilbert and Gubar shrewdly observe that Rochester’s extensive
sexual experience is almost the final respect in which Jane is not his
equal, but they doubtless would agree that Jane’s sexual imagination
overmatches his, at least implicitly. After all, she has every advantage,
because she tells the story, and very aggressively indeed. Few novels
match this one in the author’s will-to-power over her reader. “Reader!”
Jane keeps crying out, and then she exuberantly cudgels that reader into
the way things are, as far as she is concerned. Is that battered reader a
man or a woman?
I tend to agree with Sylvère Monod’s judgment that “Charlotte Brontë
is thus led to bully her reader because she distrusts him ... he is a vapid,
conventional creature, clearly deserving no more than he is given.”
Certainly he is less deserving than the charmingly wicked and Byronic
Rochester, who is given a lot more punishment than he deserves. I verge
upon saying that Charlotte Brontë exploits the masochism of her male
readers, and I may as well say it, because much of Jane Eyre’s rather nasty
Novelists and Novels 129

power as a novel depends upon its author’s attitude towards men, which is
nobly sadistic as befits a disciple of Byron.
“But what about female readers?” someone might object, and they
might add: “What about Rochester’s own rather nasty power? Surely he
could not have gotten away with his behavior had he not been a man and
well-financed to boot?” But is Rochester a man? Does he not share in the
full ambiguity of Byron’s multivalent sexual identities? And is Jane Eyre a
woman? Is Byron’s Don Juan a man? The nuances of gender, within liter-
ary representation, are more bewildering even than they are in the bedroom.
If Freud was right when he reminded us that there are never two in a bed,
but a motley crowd of forebears as well, how much truer this becomes in
literary romance than in family romance.
Jane Eyre, like Wuthering Heights, is after all a romance, however
northern, and not a novel, properly speaking. Its standards of representa-
tion have more to do with Jacobean melodrama and Gothic fiction than
with George Eliot and Thackeray, and more even with Byron’s Lara and
Manfred than with any other works. Rochester is no Heathcliff; he lives in
a social reality in which Heathcliff would be an intruder even if Heathcliff
cared for social realities except as fields in which to take revenge. Yet there
is a daemon in Rochester. Heathcliff is almost nothing but daemonic, and
Rochester has enough of the daemonic to call into question any current
feminist reading of Jane Eyre. Consider the pragmatic close of the book,
which is Jane’s extraordinary account of her wedded bliss:

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entire-
ly for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely
blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my
husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to
her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and
flesh of his flesh.
I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of
mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that
beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together.
To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay
as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other
is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence
is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are
precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result.
Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union:
perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near—that
knit us so very close! for I was then his vision, as I am still his right
130 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his
eye. He saw nature—he saw books through me; and never did I
weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect
of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam—of the landscape
before us; of the weather round us—and impressing by sound on
his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I
weary of reading to him: never did I weary of conducting him
where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to be
done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most
exquisite, even though sad—because he claimed these services
without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so
truly that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he
felt I loved him so fondly that to yield that attendance was to
indulge my sweetest wishes.

What are we to make of Charlotte Brontë’s strenuous literalization of


Gen. 2:23, her astonishing “ever more absolutely bone of his bone and
flesh of his flesh”? Is that feminism? And what precisely is that “pleasure in
my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad”? In her “Farewell
to Angria” (the world of her early fantasies), Charlotte Brontë asserted that
“the mind would cease from excitement and turn now to a cooler region.”
Perhaps that cooler region was found in Shirley or in Villette, but fortu-
nately it was not discovered in Jane Eyre. In the romance of Jane and
Rochester, or of Charlotte Brontë and George Gordon, Lord Byron, we
are still in Angria, “that burning clime where we have sojourned too
long—its skies flame—the glow of sunset is always upon it—.”
N O V E L I S T S
Emily Brontë

A N D
(1818–1848)

N O V E L S
Wuthering Heights

WUTHERING HEIGHTS IS AS UNIQUE AND IDIOSYNCRATIC A NARRATIVE AS


Moby-Dick, and like Melville’s masterwork breaks all the confines of genre. Its
sources, like the writings of the other Brontës, are in the fantasy literature of
a very young woman, in the poems that made up Emily Brontë’s Gondal saga
or cycle. Many of those poems, while deeply felt, simply string together
Byronic commonplaces. A few of them are extraordinarily strong and match
Wuthering Heights in sublimity, as in the famous lyric dated January 2, 1846:

No coward soul is mine


No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast


Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds


That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one


Holding so fast by thy infinity

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132 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality

With wide-embracing love


Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone


And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death


Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.

We could hardly envision Catherine Earnshaw, let alone Heathcliff,


chanting these stanzas. The voice is that of Emily Jane Brontë addressing
the God within her own breast, a God who certainly has nothing in com-
mon with the one worshipped by the Reverend Patrick Brontë. I do not
hear in this poem, despite all its Protestant resonances, any nuance of
Byron’s inverted Miltonisms. Wuthering Heights seems to me a triumphant
revision of Byron’s Manfred, with the revisionary swerve taking Emily
Brontë into what I would call an original gnosis, a kind of poetic faith, like
Blake’s or Emerson’s, that resembles some aspects (but not others) of
ancient Gnosticism without in any way actually deriving from Gnostic
texts. “No coward soul is mine” also emerges from an original gnosis, from
the poet’s knowing that her pneuma or breath-soul, as compared to her less
ontological psyche, is no part of the created world, since that world fell
even as it was created. Indeed the creation, whether heights or valley,
appears in Wuthering Heights as what the ancient Gnostics called the keno-
ma, a cosmological emptiness into which we have been thrown, a trope that
Catherine Earnshaw originates for herself. A more overt Victorian
Gnostic, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, made the best (if anti-feminist) observa-
tion on the setting of Wuthering Heights, a book whose “power and sound
style” he greatly admired:

It is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster, combining all the


stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs.
Novelists and Novels 133

Brownrigg. The action is laid in Hell,—only it seems places and


people have English names there.

Mrs. Brownrigg was a notorious eighteenth-century sadistic and mur-


derous midwife, and Rossetti rather nastily imputed to Wuthering Heights
a considerable female sadism. The book’s violence is astonishing but
appropriate, and appealed darkly both to Rossetti and to his close friend,
the even more sadomasochistic Swinburne. Certainly the psychodynamics
of the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine go well beyond the
domain of the pleasure principle. Gilbert and Gubar may stress too much
that Heathcliff is Catherine’s whip, the answer to her most profound fan-
tasies, but the suggestion was Emily Brontë’s before it became so fully
developed by her best feminist critics.
Walter Pater remarked that the precise use of the term romantic did
not apply to Sir Walter Scott, but rather:

Much later, in a Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a


more really characteristic fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily
Brontë, the romance of Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton
Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliff—tearing open
Catherine’s grave, removing one side of her coffin, that he may
really lie beside her in death—figures so passionate, yet woven on
a background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery, being typ-
ical examples of that spirit.

I always have wondered why Pater found the Romantic spirit more in
Hareton and the younger Catherine than in Catherine Earnshaw, but I
think now that Pater’s implicit judgment was characteristically shrewd.
The elder Catherine is the problematical figure in the book; she alone
belongs to both orders of representation, that of social reality and that of
otherness, of the Romantic Sublime. After she and the Lintons, Edgar and
Isabella, are dead, then we are wholly in Heathcliff ’s world for the last half-
year of his life, and it is in that world that Hareton and the younger
Catherine are portrayed for us. They are—as Heathcliff obscurely sens-
es—the true heirs to whatever societally possible relationship Heathcliff
and the first Catherine could have had.
Emily Brontë died less than half a year after her thirtieth birthday,
having finished Wuthering Heights when she was twenty-eight. Even
Charlotte, the family survivor, died before she turned thirty-nine, and the
world of Wuthering Heights reflects the Brontë reality: the first Catherine
dies at eighteen, Hindley at twenty-seven, Heathcliff ’s son Linton at sev-
134 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

enteen, Isabella at thirty-one, Edgar at thirty-nine, and Heathcliff at thir-


ty-seven or thirty-eight. It is a world where you marry early, because you
will not live long. Hindley is twenty when he marries Frances, while
Catherine Earnshaw is seventeen when she marries the twenty-one-year-
old Edgar Linton. Heathcliff is nineteen when he makes his hellish mar-
riage to poor Isabella, who is eighteen at the time. The only happy lovers,
Hareton and the second Catherine, are twenty-four and eighteen, respec-
tively, when they marry. Both patterns—early marriage and early death—
are thoroughly High Romantic, and emerge from the legacy of Shelley,
dead at twenty-nine, and of Byron, martyred to the cause of Greek inde-
pendence at thirty-six.
The passions of Gondal are scarcely moderated in Wuthering Heights,
nor could they be; Emily Brontë’s religion is essentially erotic, and her
vision of triumphant sexuality is so mingled with death that we can imag-
ine no consummation for the love of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw
except death. I find it difficult therefore to accept Gilbert and Gubar’s
reading in which Wuthering Heights becomes a Romantic feminist critique
of Paradise Lost, akin to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Emily Brontë is no
more interested in refuting Milton than in sustaining him. What Gilbert
and Gubar uncover in Wuthering Heights that is antithetical to Paradise Lost
comes directly from Byron’s Manfred, which certainly is a Romantic cri-
tique of Paradise Lost. Wuthering Heights is Manfred converted to prose
romance, and Heathcliff is more like Manfred, Lara, and Byron himself
than is Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester.
Byronic incest—the crime of Manfred and Astarte—is no crime for
Emily Brontë, since Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are more truly
brother and sister than are Hindley and Catherine. Whatever inverted
morality—a curious blend of Catholicism and Calvinism—Byron enjoyed,
Emily Brontë herself repudiates, so that Wuthering Heights becomes a cri-
tique of Manfred, though hardly from a conventional feminist perspective.
The furious energy that is loosed in Wuthering Heights is precisely Gnostic;
its aim is to get back to the original Abyss, before the creation-fall. Like
Blake, Emily Brontë identifies her imagination with the Abyss, and her
pneuma or breath-soul with the Alien God, who is antithetical to the God
of the creeds. The heroic rhetoric of Catherine Earnshaw is beyond every
ideology, every merely social formulation, beyond even the dream of jus-
tice or of a better life, because it is beyond this cosmos, “this shattered
prison”:

“Oh, you see, Nelly! he would not relent a moment, to keep me


out of the grave! That is how I’m loved! Well, never mind! That is
Novelists and Novels 135

not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me—
he’s in my soul. And,” added she, musingly, “the thing that irks me
most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being
enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world,
and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and
yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really
with it, and in it. Nelly, you think you are better and more fortu-
nate than I; in full health and strength. You are sorry for me—very
soon that will be altered. I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incom-
parably beyond and above you all. I wonder he won’t be near me!”
She went on to herself. “I thought he wished it. Heathcliff, dear!
you should not be sullen now. Do come to me, Heathcliff.”

Whatever we are to call the mutual passion of Catherine and


Heathcliff, it has no societal aspect and neither seeks nor needs societal
sanction. Romantic love has no fiercer representation in all of literature.
But “love” seems an inadequate term for the connection between Catherine
and Heathcliff. There are no elements of transference in that relation, nor
can we call the attachment involved either narcissistic or anaclitic. If Freud
is not applicable, then neither is Plato. These extraordinary vitalists,
Catherine and Heathcliff, do not desire in one another that which each does
not possess, do not lean themselves against one another, and do not even
find and thus augment their own selves. They are one another, which is nei-
ther sane nor possible, and which does not support any doctrine of libera-
tion whatsoever. Only that most extreme of visions, Gnosticism, could
accommodate them, for, like the Gnostic adepts, Catherine and Heathcliff
can only enter the pleroma or fullness together, as presumably they have
done after Heathcliff ’s self-induced death by starvation.
Blake may have promised us the Bible of Hell; Emily Brontë seems to
have disdained Heaven and Hell alike. Her finest poem (for which we have
no manuscript, but it is inconceivable that it could have been written by
Charlotte) rejects every feeling save her own inborn “first feelings” and every
world except a vision of earth consonant with those inaugural emotions:

Often rebuked, yet always back returning


To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;


Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
136 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

And visions rising, legion after legion,


Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,


And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where any own nature would be leading:


It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?


More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gen-


der as it is beyond creed or “high morality.” It is the voice of Catherine
Earnshaw, celebrating her awakening from the dream of heaven:

“I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home;
and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the
angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the
heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for
joy.”
N O V E L I S T S
George Eliot

A N D
(1819–1880)

N O V E L S
Even taken in its derivative meaning of outline, what is form but the
limit of that deference by which we discriminate one object from anoth-
er?—a limit determined partly by the intrinsic relations or composition
of the object, & partly by the extrinsic action of other bodies upon it. This
is true whether the object is a rock or a man ...
—GEORGE ELIOT, “Notes on Forms in Art”

IT WAS FREUD, IN OUR TIME, WHO TAUGHT US AGAIN WHAT THE PRE-
Socratics taught: ethos is the daimon, character is fate. A generation before
Freud, George Eliot taught the same unhappy truth to her contemporaries.
If character is fate, then in a harsh sense there can be no accidents.
Character presumably is less volatile than personality, and we tend to dis-
dain anyone who would say: personality is fate. Personalities suffer acci-
dents; characters endure fate. If we seek major personalities among the
great novelists, we find many competitors: Balzac, Tolstoi, Dickens, Henry
James, even the enigmatic Conrad. By general agreement, the grand
instance of a moral character would be George Eliot. She has a nearly
unique spiritual authority, best characterized by the English critic Walter
Allen about twenty years ago:

George Eliot is the first novelist in the world in some things, and
they are the things that come within the scope of her moral inter-
pretation of life. Circumscribed though it was, it was certainly not
narrow; nor did she ever forget the difficulty attendant upon the
moral life and the complexity that goes to its making.

137
138 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Her peculiar gift, almost unique despite her place in a tradition of dis-
placed Protestantism that includes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and
Wordsworth’s poetry, is to dramatize her interpretations in such a way as
to abolish the demarcations between aesthetic pleasure and moral renun-
ciation. Richardson’s heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, and Wordsworth in his
best poems share in a compensatory formula: experiential loss can be trans-
formed into imaginative gain. Eliot’s imagination, despite its
Wordsworthian antecedents, and despite the ways in which Clarissa
Harlowe is the authentic precursor of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, is
too severe to accept the formula of compensation. The beauty of renunci-
ation in Eliot’s fiction does not result from a transformation of loss, but
rather from a strength that is in no way dependent upon exchange or gain.
Eliot presents us with the puzzle of what might be called the Moral
Sublime. To her contemporaries, this was no puzzle. F.W.H. Myers,
remembered now as a “psychic researcher” (a marvelous metaphor that we
oddly use as a title for those who quest after spooks) and as the father of
L.H. Myers, author of the novel The Near and the Far, wrote a famous
description of Eliot’s 1873 visit to Cambridge:

I remember how at Cambridge I walked with her once in the


Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she,
stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the
three words which had been used so often as the inspiring trum-
pet-call of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pro-
nounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first,
how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and
absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents confirmed
the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law. I lis-
tened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned
towards me like a sybil’s in the gloom; it was as though she with-
drew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise and
left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when
we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of for-
est trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be
gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls—
on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left
empty of God.

However this may sound now, Myers intended no ironies. As the


sybil of “unrecompensing Law,” Eliot joined the austere company of
nineteenth-century prose prophets: Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman and Arnold
Novelists and Novels 139

in England; Emerson in America; Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard


and finally Freud on the Continent. But this ninefold, though storytellers
of a sort, wrote no novels. Eliot’s deepest affinities were scarcely with
Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, and yet her formal achievement
requires us to read her as we read them. This causes difficulties, since Eliot
was not a great stylist, and was far more immersed in philosophical than in
narrative tradition. Yet her frequent clumsiness in authorial asides and her
hesitations in storytelling matter not at all. We do not even regret her
absolute lack of any sense of the comic, which never dares take revenge
upon her anyway. Wordsworth at his strongest, as in “Resolution and
Independence,” still can be unintentionally funny (which inspired the
splendid parodies of the poem’s leech-gatherer and its solipsistic bard in
Lewis Carroll’s “White Knight’s Ballad,” and Edward Lear’s “Incidents in
the Life of my uncle Arly”). But I have seen no effective parodies of
George Eliot, and doubt their possibility. It is usually unwise to be witty
concerning our desperate need, not only to decide upon right action, but
also to will such action, against pleasure and against what we take to be
self-interest. Like Freud, Eliot ultimately is an inescapable moralist, pre-
cisely delineating our discomfort with culture, and remorselessly weighing
the economics of the psyche’s civil wars.

II

George Eliot is not one of the great letter writers. Her letters matter
because they are hers, and in some sense do tell part of her own story, but
they do not yield to a continuous reading. On a scale of nineteenth-centu-
ry letter-writing by important literary figures, in which Keats would rank
first, and Walter Pater last (the Paterian prose style is never present in his
letters), Eliot would find a place about dead center. She is always herself in
her letters, too much herself perhaps, but that self is rugged, honest, and
formidably inspiring. Our contemporary feminist critics seem to me a
touch uncomfortable with Eliot. Here she is on extending the franchise to
women, in a letter to John Morley (May 14, 1867):

Thank you for your kind remembrance. Your attitude in relation


to Female Enfranchisement seems to be very nearly mine. If I
were called on to act in the matter, I would certainly not oppose
any plan which held out a reasonable promise of tending to estab-
lish as far as possible an equivalence of advantages for the two
sexes, as to education and the possibilities of free development. I
fear you may have misunderstood something I said the other
140 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

evening about nature. I never meant to urge the “intention of


Nature” argument, which is to me a pitiable fallacy. I mean that as
a fact of mere zoological evolution, woman seems to me to have
the worst share in existence. But for that very reason I would the
more contend that in the moral evolution we have “an art which
does mend nature”—an art which “itself is nature.” It is the func-
tion of love in the largest sense, to mitigate the harshness of all
fatalities. And in the thorough recognition of that worse share, I
think there is a basis for a sublimer resignation in woman and a
more regenerating tenderness in man.
However, I repeat that I do not trust very confidently to my own
impressions on this subject. The peculiarities of my own lot may
have caused me to have idiosyncrasies rather than an average judg-
ment. The one conviction on the matter which I hold with some
tenacity is, that through all transitions the goal towards which we
are proceeding is a more clearly discerned distinctness of function
(allowing always for exceptional cases of individual organization)
with as near an approach to equivalence of good for woman and
for man as can be secured by the effort of growing moral force to
lighten the pressure of hard non-moral outward conditions. It is
rather superfluous, perhaps injudicious, to plunge into such deeps
as these in a hasty note, but it is difficult to resist the desire to
botch imperfect talk with a little imperfect writing.

This is a strong insistence upon form in life as in art, upon the limit of
that difference by which we discriminate one object from another. I have
heard feminist critics decry it as defeatism, though Eliot speaks of “mere
zoological evolution” as bringing about every woman’s “worse share in
existence.” “A sublimer resignation in woman” is not exactly a popular goal
these days, but Eliot never speaks of the sublime without profundity and
an awareness of human loss. When she praises Ruskin as a teacher “with
the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet,” she also judges him to be “strongly
akin to the sublimest part of Wordsworth,” a judgment clearly based upon
the Wordsworthian source of Ruskin’s tropes for the sense of loss that
dominates the sublime experience. The harshness of being a woman, how-
ever mitigated by societal reform, will remain, Eliot reminds us, since we
cannot mend nature and its unfairness. Her allusion to the Shakespearean
“art which does mend nature,” and which “itself is nature” (Winter’s Tale,
IV.iv.88–96) subtly emends Shakespeare in the deliberately wistful hope for
a moral evolution of love between the sexes. What dominates this letter to
Morley is a harsh plangency, yet it is anything but defeatism. Perhaps Eliot
Novelists and Novels 141

should have spoken of a “resigned sublimity” rather than a “sublime resig-


nation,” but her art, and life, give the lie to any contemporary feminist
demeaning of the author of Middlemarch, who shares with Jane Austen and
Emily Dickinson the eminence of being the strongest women writers in
the English language.

Daniel Deronda

All seven novels by Eliot were immensely popular in her own lifetime. Today
there is common consent that The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch
(1871–72) are as vital as they were more than a century ago. Adam Bede
(1859) is respected but not widely read or studied, while Romola (1862–63) is
rightly forgotten. Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) retains some current interest,
but less perhaps than Adam Bede. Silas Marner (1861) remains an extraordi-
nary reading experience, and probably is undervalued by most critics.
Rereading it after decades away from it, I find astonishing mythological
power throughout its apparently serene pastoralism. The problematic novel
by Eliot is of course Daniel Deronda (1876), which has divided its readers and
will go on confusing them. Dr. Leavis and others proposed the radical solu-
tion of quarrying a new novel, Gwendolyn Harleth, out of the book, thus cre-
ating an achievement for Eliot not unlike the Emma or Persuasion of Jane
Austen. In this drastic operation, the hero, Daniel Deronda himself, was to
be all but discarded, primarily on the grounds that his endless nobility was
wearisome. Deronda is an incipient Zionist leader who is nine-tenths a prig
and only one-tenth a passionate idealist. He simply is not a male Dorothea
Brooke, as his scenes with Gwendolyn Harleth invariably show. She vaults
off the page; he lacks personality, or else possesses so much character that he
sinks with it, into a veritable bathos in a few places.
And yet, as many critics keep remarking, Deronda is not quite so eas-
ily discarded, because the remarkable Gwendolyn is convincingly in love
with him and also because the even more remarkable George Eliot is in
love with him also. Her portrait of George Henry Lewes, her common-law
husband, as Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch does not persuade us that he is
a wholly fit partner, whether for George Eliot or for Dorothea Brooke.
Deronda sometimes makes me think him a Jewish Caspar Goodwood, just
as Gwendolyn seems half-way between Elizabeth Bennet and Isabel
Archer. Henry James, in his equivocal “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,”
neatly gives his “Theodora” a positive judgment of Deronda, “Pulcheria”
a rather more pungent negative one, and the judicious “Constantius” an
ambiguous balance between the two:
142 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Theodora. And the advice he gives Gwendolyn, the things he says


to her, they are the very essence of wisdom, of warm human wis-
dom, knowing life and feeling it. “Keep you fear as a safeguard, it
may make consequences passionately present to you.” What can
be better than that?

Pulcheria. Nothing, perhaps. But what can be drearier than a novel


in which the function of the hero—young, handsome, and bril-
liant—is to give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the
young, beautiful, and brilliant heroine?

Constantius. That is not putting it quite fairly. The function of


Deronda is to have Gwendolyn fall in love with him ...

Constantius adds, rather mordantly: “Poor Gwendolyn’s falling in love


with Deronda is part of her own luckless history, not of his.” The implied
view of Deronda here is not too far from that of Robert Louis Stevenson,
for whom the visionary Zionist was “the Prince of Prigs.” Against all this
must be set the reaction of George Eliot herself, dismissing “the laudation
of readers who cut the book into scraps and talk of nothing in it but
Gwendolyn. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything
else there.” We can test this relatedness in one of the novel’s great
moments, when Gwendolyn is compelled to recognize a rejection that she
legitimately cannot be expected to understand:

That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in
Gwendolyn’s small life: she was for the first time feeling the pres-
sure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dis-
lodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense
that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with
which her own was revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and
widowhood had still left her with the implicit impression which
had accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded
her was somehow specially for her, and it was because of this that
no personal jealousy had been roused in her in relation to
Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him as rightfully
belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a shock
which went deeper than personal jealousy—something spiritual
and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all
anger into self-humiliation.
Novelists and Novels 143

Perhaps this is Eliot’s greatest power: to represent the falling away of


a solipsism, not ignoble as an involuntary movement, into the terror of a
sublime solitude. Gwendolyn after all is losing not only her potential lover,
but her virtual superego, though a superego very different from the
Freudian model. The Freudian superego demands that the hapless ego
surrender its aggressivities, and then continues to torment the ego for
being too aggressive still. But Deronda is the gravest and most gentleman-
ly of consciences, perhaps because he mysteriously associates his own
shrouded origins with Gwendolyn’s undeveloped self. This is the subtle
surmise of Martin Price in his Forms of Life, a study of “Character and
Moral Imagination in the Novel.” Price reads Gwendolyn as a character
terrorized by her own empty strength of will, oppressed by the potential
solitude to which her own will may convey her. Ironically, that fear of the
sublime attracts its own doom in the sadistic Grandcourt, who marries
Gwendolyn in certainly the most dreadful of all mismatches, even in Eliot.
Her strength blocked, her will thwarted, Gwendolyn seems condemned to
perpetual death-in-life, until George Eliot rescues her heroine by one of
her characteristic drownings, thus relieving Gwendolyn of her error but
depriving the reader of a splendidly hateful object in Grandcourt, who is
one of Eliot’s negative triumphs.
Eliot is masterly in never quiet explaining precisely what draws
Deronda to Gwendolyn. Absurd high-mindedness aside, it does seem that
Deronda needs the lady’s well-developed sense of self, as Price suggests.
Himself a kind of changeling, Deronda needs to enact rescue-fantasies,
with Gwendolyn taking the place of the absent mother. If that seems too
close to Freud’s essay “Family Romances,” and too far from Eliot’s fiction,
then we ought to recall the yearnings of Dorothea Brooke and of Lydgate
in Middlemarch, and Eliot’s own lifelong yearnings to “rescue” distin-
guished male intellectuals. Instilling a moral conscience in the charming
Gwendolyn may seem a curious training for a future Zionist uplifter, but
in Eliot’s universe it is perhaps an inevitable induction for someone deter-
mined to be a prophet of his people’s moral regeneration.
Price sums up Gwendolyn by associating her with Estella in Great
Expectations and with Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Like
them, the even more charming and forceful Gwendolyn must be reduced
in scope and intensity in order to become a better person, or perhaps only
an imperfect solipsist. Price is very much in Eliot’s mode when he counts
and accepts the cost of assigning sublimity to moral energy: “There is a loss
of scale as one dwindles to a moral being; yet it is also the emergence of a
self from the welter of assertion and impulse that has often provided an
impressive substitute.” Something in the reader, something not necessari-
144 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

ly daemonic, wants to protest, wants to ask Eliot: “Must there always be a


loss in scope? Must one dwindle to a moral being?”
* * *
Eliot herself, in her letters, gives one answer theoretically (and it is con-
sistent with the burden of Daniel Deronda, and a very different one prag-
matically), since she palpably gains scale even as she gorgeously augments
her self as a moral being. Whatever her letters may lack as narrative, or in
Ruskinian madness, they continuously teach us the necessity of confronting
our own moral evasions and self-disenchantments. Here she is in full
strength, writing to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe on October 29, 1876:

As to the Jewish element in “Deronda,” I expected from first to last


in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and
even repulsion than it has actually met with. But precisely because
I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is—I hard-
ly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed
in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to
treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and
knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews,
but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in
contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is
observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is
nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse
the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in
those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in cus-
toms and beliefs. But towards the Hebrews we western people who
have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt and, whether
we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in
religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting
than to hear people called “educated” making small jokes about
eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge
as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the histo-
ry of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They
hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men educated at
Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this
deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us,
this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in
the same coat-tails and flounces as our own lies very close to the
worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is
a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupid-
ity, which is still the average mark of our culture.
Novelists and Novels 145

Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found ... I sum up with
the writer of the Book of Maccabees “if I have done well, and as
befits the subject, it is what I desired, but if I have done ill, it is
what I could attain unto” ...

Confronted by that power of moral earnestness, the critic is properly


disarmed. It hardly suffices to murmur that Deronda is the Prince of Prigs,
or to lament that Gwendolyn’s imaginative force and human charm
deserved something better than a dwindling down into moral coherence.
Eliot is too modest in summing up with the barely inspired writer of the
Book of the Maccabees. She sums up with the author of Job, and with
Tolstoi. Daniel Deronda may be a more vexed creation than The Mill on the
Floss or Middlemarch, but it carries their moral authority, Biblical and
Tolstoyan. No one after Eliot has achieved her peculiar and invaluable syn-
thesis between the moral and aesthetic, and perhaps it never will be
achieved again.

The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860) is George Eliot’s strongest achievement before
Middlemarch (1871–72) and remains a vital novel by any standards.
Rereading it confirms my earlier annoyance at its inadequate conclusion,
the drowning of the heroine Maggie Tulliver, and her beloved brother
Tom, by the Floss river in full flood. But this seems the only substantial
blemish in one of the major autobiographical novels in the language, com-
parable to Dickens’s David Copperfield and prophetic of Lawrence’s Sons
and Lovers. The splendor of The Mill on the Floss is almost entirely in Eliot’s
portrayal of her own earlier phases in the intensely sympathetic: Maggie,
whose death most readers fiercely resent. There is no tragic necessity in
Maggie’s drowning, and I do not believe that literary criticism is capable of
explaining why Eliot made so serious a blunder, though recently feminist
critics have ventured upon correcting some of Eliot’s perspectives. Moral
criticism of George Eliot, in my judgment, does not work very well, since
the critic, of whatever gender or ideological persuasion, presumes to enter
upon a contest with the most formidable and imaginative moralist in the
history of the British novel.
I myself can only speculate upon why Eliot decided to destroy her ear-
lier self by drowning the humane and luminous Maggie. Certainly it was
not because the novelist could not imagine a form of life for her surrogate
self. Maggie moves us most because her yearning demand is for more life,
for a sublime relationship to herself, to other selves and to the world. Dr.
146 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

F.R. Leavis, who made of an ill-defined “maturity” a critical shibboleth,


decided that Maggie was immature and lacked self-knowledge, and so must
have reflected a phase in Eliot’s development when she was not yet worthy
of Leavisite endorsement. Rereading The Mill on the Floss is likelier to show
the reader that Maggie has a healthy sexual nature and does the best she
can for herself in a harsh society, while ultimately restrained by the con-
siderable moral perplexities of her own passionately divided psyche. The
center of Maggie’s dilemma is her erotic attachment to Stephen Guest, a
whipping-boy for critics from Eliot’s contemporaries on to ours. Readers
of The Mill on the Floss need to ask why George Eliot has Maggie renounce
Stephen, before they can ask why the author concludes by Maggie’s gratu-
itous death.
“Renunciation,” as Emily Dickinson wrote with wit grand and grim,
“is a piercing virtue,” and perhaps it killed Maggie Tulliver, which is a curi-
ous paradox at best, since George Eliot consciously cannot have intended
some causal connection between her heroine’s abandonment of sexual hap-
piness and subsequent drowning in her brother’s embrace. Yet there is an
authentic link between the almost unmotivated renunciation and the arbi-
trarily imposed conclusion. We sense that if Maggie had married Stephen,
the Floss would not have flooded. That is an outrageous sentence, I sup-
pose, but not nearly so outrageous as the renunciation, which is a self-vio-
lation rather than a self-sacrifice on Maggie’s part. And the renunciation,
though senseless, is far short of the sentimental outrageousness of the con-
clusion, with its veiled metaphor of incestuous passion:
Nothing else was said; a new danger was being carried towards
them by the river. Some wooden machinery had just given way on
one of the wharves, and huge fragments were being floated along.
The sun was rising now, and the wide area of watery desolation
was spread out in dreadful clearness around them—in dreadful
clearness floated onwards the hurrying, threatening masses. A
large company in a boat that was working its way along under the
Tofton houses, observed their danger, and shouted, “Get out of
the current!”
But that could not be done at once, and Tom, looking before
him, saw Death rushing on them. Huge fragments, clinging
together in fatal fellowship, made one wide mass across the
stream.
“It is coming, Maggie!” Tom said, in a deep hoarse voice, loos-
ing the oars, and clasping her.
The next instant the boat was no longer seen upon the water—
and the huge mass was hurrying on in hideous triumph.
Novelists and Novels 147

But soon the keel of the boat reappeared, a black speck on the
golden water.
The boat reappeared—but brother and sister had gone down in
an embrace never to be parted—living through again in one
supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little
hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.

“Clinging together in fatal fellowship” is the darkly revelatory empha-


sis of this ending, which compels the reader to surmise that the repressed
motive for the renunciation of Stephen was the attachment between sister
and brother.
“One supreme moment,” since sexual union is barred, has to be mutu-
al immolation. This may seem more like the Shelley of The Revolt of Islam
than the Wordsworth of The Excursion, and certainly would have been
rejected as an interpretation by George Eliot herself. But it may help
explain so wayward and inadequate a culmination to a novel otherwise
worthy of the intense and varied existence, tragically brief, of Maggie
Tulliver.

Silas Marner

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe remains a beautiful and highly readable
book, still immensely popular 130 years after its initial publication. It is not
quite of the aesthetic eminence of George Eliot’s masterwork,
Middlemarch, but only because it is much the less ambitious novel, far
shorter and confined as it is to a small village in the Midlands. Its protag-
onists are simple people, seen against a background in which the common
folk of the countryside and the natural world itself are so interpenetrated
that we feel we might be reading a narrative poem by William
Wordsworth, whose spirit hovers everywhere. Henry James, writing about
Silas Marner, and the early Adam Bede, George Eliot’s first full-length
novel, said “her perception was a perception of nature much more than of
art,” by which he meant that both books thus displayed an artistic weak-
ness. James was not much interested in country folk, and Silas Marner is
very much a pastoral novel, prophesying Thomas Hardy. We learn to read
Silas Marner as we read the Book of Ruth in the Bible, or as we mull over
Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage or Hardy’s The Return of the Native. A
vision of nature and its processes is as much a part of such pastoral stories
as the leading characters are, and Henry James’s distinction between a per-
ception of nature and a perception of art fades away in great writings of
this kind.
148 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

F.R. Leavis sensibly compares Silas Marner to Charles Dickens’s Hard


Times, pointing out that both were “moral fables.” A moral fable presum-
ably allows for somewhat different standards of probability than a wholly
naturalistic fiction could sustain. Silas is truly a rather unlikely prospect,
being a half-mad solitary, to have a deserted child deposited upon his
hearth, but within the aesthetic borders of what is almost a fairy story (as
Leavis observed) the substitution of the little Eppie for Silas’s stolen gold
and dead sister is wonderfully persuasive:

When Marner’s sensibility returned, he continued the action


Which had been arrested, and closed his door, unaware of the
Chasm in his consciousness, unaware of any intermediate Change,
except that the light had grown dim, and that he was Chilled and
faint. He thought he had been too long standing at the door and
looking out. Turning towards the hearth where the two logs had
fallen apart, and sent forth only a red uncertain glimmer, he seat-
ed himself on his fireside chair, and was stooping to push his logs
together, when, to his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were on
the floor in front of the hearth. Gold!—his own gold!—brought
back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away! He felt his
heart beginning to beat violently, and for a few moments he was
unable to stretch out his hand and grasp the restored treasure.
The heap of gold seemed to glow and get larger beneath his agi-
tated gaze. He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth his hand;
but instead of the hard coin with the familiar resisting outline, his
fingers encountered oft warm curls. In utter amazement, Silas fell
on his knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was
a sleeping child—a round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all
over its head. Could this be his little sister come back to him in a
dream—his little sister whom he carried about in his arms for a
year before she died, when he was a small boy without shoes or
stockings? That was the first thought that darted across Silas’s
blank wonderment. Was it a dream? He rose to his feet again,
pushed his logs together, and, throwing on some dried leaves and
sticks, raised a flame; but the flame did not disperse the vision—it
only lit up more distinctly the little round form of the child and
its shabby clothing. It was very much like his little sister.

In a fable of regeneration, like Silas Marner, this epiphany has extraor-


dinary plangency and force. George Eliot’s art, throughout the book, is
almost flawless in its patience. The narrator’s stance is one of
Novelists and Novels 149

Wordsworthian “wise passivity”; it is nature and community working slow-


ly and silently together that regenerate Silas and that punish both the Cass
brothers, each in proportion to his hardness of heart. It is the same spirit,
of what might be called the natural, simple heart, that is manifested by
Eppie when she chooses to stay with Silas rather than return to the wealthy
father who abandoned her:

‘Thank you, ma’am—thank you, sir, for your offers—they’re very


great, and far above my wish. For I should have no delight in my
life any more if I was forced to go away from my father, and knew
he was sitting at home, a-thinking of me and feeling lone. We’ve
been used to be happy together every day, and I can’t Think o’ no
happiness without him. And he says he’d nobody i’ The world till
I was sent to him, and he’d have nothing when I Was gone. And
he’s took care of me and loved me from the First, and I’ll cleave to
him as long as he lives, and nobody shall Ever come between him
and me.’

“Cleaving” is the Biblical metaphor there and throughout Silas


Marner. Most moral fables in literature fall away into an Abstract harsh-
ness, and become rather bad books. George Eliot’s genius vitalizes he fairy
story or fabulistic aspect of Silas Marner, because of her uncanny power of
humanizing all concerns of morality. In a letter to her publisher, she
remarked upon “the remedial influence of pure, natural human relations,”
as she had sought to portray them, and then added a fine, afterthought:
“The Nemesis is a very mild one.”

Middlemarch

What can we mean when we speak of the “moral authority” of a great nov-
elist? To invoke the phrase, in English, is to intimate George Eliot, rather
than Charles Dickens, Henry James, or Joseph Conrad. This is hardly to
deny Bleak House, The Bostonians, or The Secret Agent their wealth of moral
insight, but rather recognizes an uniqueness in George Eliot.
That there is something grave and majestic that informs Middlemarch,
we scarcely can evade sensing. The protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, is more
than a secular St. Theresa; she is a preternaturally strong soul capable of
fighting through her own errors. The strong figures who go under—
Bulstrode, the peculiar Casaubon, the self-ruined Lydgate (precursor of
Dick Diver in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night)—yield to flaws in their
natures. Dorothea, like George Eliot, is a Wordsworthian. Projected sub-
150 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

limity, traditional heroism, is set aside, and a new sublimity shared by the
self and nature takes its place.
Dorothea, in her moral intensity, is the ancestress of figures in
Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, but her curious, inward strength has
few analogues in other heroines. Henry James, subtly unnerved by
Middlemarch, indulged in defensive fault-finding, much as he had done
with The Scarlet Letter. What made James uncomfortable was a sublimity
that his great characters, Isabel Archer in particular, were too evasive to
sustain.
It has been too easy to confuse George Eliot’s moral vision, as even
Nietzsche showed, when he scorned her for supposedly believing that you
could retain Christian morality while discarding the Christian God.
George Eliot’s advocacy of renunciation is not Christian, any more than
Goethe’s was. The moral sublime in Eliot is allied to Goethe’s view that
our virtues become our errors as we seek to expand life. Goethe, keenly
ironical, is very different from George Eliot, who rarely allows herself
irony. But then, no critic gets anywhere by bringing an ironic perspective
to George Eliot.
Wisdom literature, in modern times, is very rare: who except George
Eliot could write it? She surprises us by her affinities to the greatest
poets—Shakespeare and Dante—affinities that are manifest in the dark
individuality with which she endows the tragic Lydgate and the undefeat-
ed quester, Dorothea.
Moral authority in imaginative literature cannot be distinguished from
clarity and power of intellect, and from the faculty of inventiveness. I can-
not think of any novelist except for George Eliot who can be compared to
Shakespeare and to Dante in these matters.
N O V E L I S T S
Gustave Flaubert

A N D
(1821–1880)

N O V E L S
Madame Bovary

At six o’clock this evening, as I was writing the word “hysterics,” I


was so swept away, was bellowing so loudly and feeling so deeply
what my little Bovary was going through, that I was afraid of hav-
ing hysterics myself. I got up from my table and opened the win-
dow to calm myself. My head was spinning. Now I have great pains
in my knees, in my back, and in my head. I feel like a man who has
———ed too much (forgive me for the expression)—a kind of rap-
turous lassitude.
(Flaubert to Louise Colet, letter of 23 December 1853)

I will not echo the Lycanthrope [Petrus Borel], remembered for a


subversiveness which no longer prevails, when he said:
“Confronted with all that is vulgar and inept in the present time,
can we not take refuge in cigarettes and adultery?” But I assert that
our world, even when it is weighed on precision scales, turns out
to be exceedingly harsh considering it was engendered by Christ;
it could hardly be entitled to throw the first stone at adultery. A
few cuckolds more or less are not likely to increase the rotating
speed of the spheres and to hasten by a second the final destruc-
tion of the universe.
(Baudelaire on Madame Bovary)

THE SOCIETAL SCANDAL OF MADAME BOVARY IS AS REMOTE NOW AS THE


asceticism of the spirit practised by Flaubert and Baudelaire, who seem
almost self-indulgent in the era of Samuel Beckett. Rereading Madame

151
152 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Bovary side-by-side with say Malone Dies is a sadly instructive experience.


Emma seems as boisterous as Hogarth or Rabelais in the company of
Malone and Macmann. And yet she is their grandmother, even as the per-
sonages of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka are among her children. With her the
novel enters the realm of inactivity, where the protagonists are bored, but
the reader is not. Poor Emma, destroyed by usury rather than love, is so
vital that her stupidities do not matter. A much more than average sensual
woman, her capacity for life and love is what moves us to admire her, and
even to love her, since like Flaubert himself we find ourselves in her.
Why is Emma so unlucky? If it can go wrong, it will go wrong for her.
Freud, like some of the ancients, believed there were no accidents. Ethos is the
daimon, your character is your fate, and everything that happens to you starts
by being you. Rereading, we suffer the anguish of beholding the phases that
lead to Emma’s self-destruction. That anguish multiplies despite Flaubert’s cel-
ebrated detachment, partly because of his uncanny skill at suggesting how many
different consciousnesses invade and impinge upon any single consciousness,
even one as commonplace as Emma’s. Emma’s I is an other, and so much the
worse for the sensual apprehensiveness that finds it has become Emma.
“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminscences” is a famous and eloquent
formula that Freud outgrew. Like Flaubert before him, he came to see that
the Emmas—meaning nearly all among us—were suffering from repressed
drives. Still later, in his final phase, Freud arrived at a vision that achieves
an ultimate clarity in the last section of Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,
which reads to me as a crucial commentary on Emma Bovary. It is not
repressed desire that ensues in anxiety, but a primal anxiety that issues in
repression. As for the variety of neurosis involved, Freud speculated that
hysteria results from fear of the loss of love. Emma kills herself in a hyste-
ria brought on by a fairly trivial financial mess, but underlying the hyste-
ria is the terrible fear that there will be no more lovers for her.
The most troubling critique of Madame Bovary that I know is by
Henry James, who worried whether we could sustain our interest in a con-
sciousness as narrow as Emma’s:

The book is a picture of the middling as much as they like, but


does Emma attain even to that? Hers is a narrow middling even
for a little imaginative person whose “social” significance is small.
It is greater on the whole than her capacity of consciousness, tak-
ing this all round; and so in a word, we feel her less illustrational
than she might have been not only if the world had offered her
more points of contact, but if she had had more of these to give it.
Novelists and Novels 153

That sounds right enough, yet rereading the novel does not make us
desire a larger or brighter Emma. Until she yields to total hysteria, she
incarnates the universal wish for sensual life, for a more sensual life. Keats
would have liked her, and so do we, though she is not exactly an Isabel
Archer or Millie Theale. A remarkable Emma might have developed the
hardness and resourcefulness that would have made her a French Becky
Sharp, and fitted her for survival even in mid-nineteenth century Paris. But
James sublimely chose to miss the point, which Albert Thibaudet got per-
manently right:

She is more ardent than passionate. She loves life, pleasure, love
itself much more than she loves a man; she is made to have lovers
rather than a lover. It is true that she loves Rodolphe with all the
fervor of her body, and with him she experiences the moment of
her complete, perfect and brief fulfillment; her illness, however,
after Rodolphe’s desertion, is sufficient to cure her of this love.
She does not die from love, but from weakness and a total inabil-
ity to look ahead, a naivete which makes her an easy prey to deceit
in love as well as in business. She lives in the present and is unable
to resist the slightest impulse.

I like best Thibaudet’s comparison between Flaubert’s attitude towards


Emma and Milton’s towards his Eve: “Whenever Emma is seen in purely
sensuous terms, he speaks of her with a delicate, almost religious feeling,
the way Milton speaks of Eve.” One feels that Milton desires Eve; Flaubert
indeed is so at one with Emma that his love for her is necessarily narcis-
sistic. Cervantes, not Milton, was in some sense Flaubert’s truest precur-
sor, and Emma (as many critics have remarked) has elements of a female
Quixote in her. Like the Don, she is murdered by reality. Milton’s Eve,
tough despite her yielding beauty, transcends both the order of reality and
the order of play. Emma, lacking a Sancho, finds her enchanted Dulcinea
in the paltry Rodolphe. Flaubert punished himself harshly, in and through
Emma, by grimly mixing in a poisonous order of provincial social reality,
and an equally poisonous order of hallucinated play, Emma’s fantasies of an
ideal passion. The mixing in is cruel, formidable, and of unmatched aes-
thetic dignity. Emma has no Sublime, but the inverted Romantic vision of
Flaubert persuades us that the strongest writing can represent ennui with
a life-enhancing power.
Sartre, very early in his endless meditations upon Flaubert, sensibly
observed that: “Flaubert despised realism and said so over and over
throughout his life; he loved only the absolute purity of art.” Madame
154 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Bovary has little to do with realism, and something to do with a prophecy


of impressionism, but in a most refracted fashion. All of poor Emma’s
moments are at once drab and privileged; one remembers Browning’s
Andrea del Sarto intoning: “A common grayness silvers everything.” The
critical impressionism of Walter Pater is implicit in Madame Bovary;
imagery of hallucinatory intensity is always a step away from suddenly
bursting forth as secularized epiphanies. The Impressionist painters and
Proust lurk in the ironies of Flaubert’s style, but the uncanny moral ener-
gy remains unique:

The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her
neck like one suffering from thirst, and glueing her lips to the
body of the Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring
strength the fullest kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he
recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right
thumb in the oil, and began to give extreme unction. First, upon
the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly goods; then upon the nos-
trils, that had been so greedy of the warm breeze and the scents of
love; then upon the mouth, that had spoken lies, moaned in pride
and cried out in lust; then upon the hands that had taken delight
in the texture of sensuality; and finally upon the soles of the feet,
so swift when she had hastened to satisfy her desires, and that
would now walk no more.

This is Flaubert’s elegy for Emma, and ultimately transcends its appar-
ent ironies, if only because we hear in it the novelist’s deeper elegy for him-
self. He refuses to mourn for himself, as befits the high priest of a purer art
than the novel knew before him, yet his lament for Emma’s sensual splen-
dor is an authentic song of loss, a loss in which he participates.
N O V E L I S T S
Fyodor Dostoevsky

A N D
(1821–1881)

N O V E L S
Crime and Punishment

REREADING CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, I AM HAUNTED SUDDENLY BY A REC-


ollection of my worst experience as a teacher. Back in 1955, an outcast
instructor in the then New Critical, Neo-Christian Yale English department
dominated by acolytes of the churchwardenly T.S. Eliot, I was compelled to
teach Crime and Punishment in a freshman course to a motley collection of
Yale legacies masquerading as students. Wearied of their response to
Dostoevsky as so much more Eliotic Original Sin, I endeavored to cheer
myself up (if not them) by reading aloud in class S.J. Perelman’s sublime par-
ody “A Farewell to Omsk,” fragments of which are always with me, such as
the highly Dostoevskian portrayal of the tobacconist Pyotr Pyotrvitch:

“Good afternoon, Afya Afyakievitch!” replied the shopkeeper


warmly. He was the son of a former notary public attached to the
household of Prince Grashkin and gave himself no few airs in con-
sequence. Whilst speaking it was his habit to extract a greasy
barometer from his waistcoat and consult it importantly, a trick he
had learned from the Prince’s barber. On seeing Afya Afyakievitch
he skipped about nimbly, dusted off the counter, gave one of his
numerous offspring a box on the ear, drank a cup of tea, and on the
whole behaved like a man of the world who has affairs of moment
occupying him.

Unfortunately, my class did not think this funny and did not even enjoy
the marvelous close of Perelman’s sketch:

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156 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

“Don’t take any flannel kopecks,” said Afya gloomily. He dis-


lodged a piece of horse-radish from his tie, shied it at a passing
Nihilist, and slid forward into the fresh loam.

Dostoevsky had his own mode of humor, but he might not have appre-
ciated Perelman either. Crime and Punishment is less apocalyptic than The
Brothers Karamazov, but it is apocalyptic enough. It is also tendentious in
the extreme, which is the point of Perelman’s parody, but Dostoevsky is so
great a tragedian that this does not matter. Raskolnikov is a powerful rep-
resentation of the will demonized by its own strength, while Svidrigailov is
beyond that, and stands on the border of a convincing phantasmagoria.
Until the unfortunate epilogue, no other narrative fiction drives itself
onwards with the remorseless strength of Crime and Punishment, truly a
shot out of hell and into hell again. To have written a naturalistic novel that
reads like a continuous nightmare is Dostoevsky’s unique achievement.
Raskolnikov never does repent and change, unless we believe the epi-
logue, in which Dostoevsky himself scarcely believed. Despair causes his
surrender to Porfiry, but even his despair never matches the fierce ecstasy
he has achieved in violating all limits. He breaks what can be broken and
yet does not break himself. He cannot be broken, not because he has found
any truth, objective or psychological, but because he has known, however
momentarily, the nihilistic abyss, a Gnostic freedom of what is beyond our
sense of being creatures in God’s creation. Konstantin Mochulsky is sure-
ly right to emphasize that Raskolnikov never comes to believe in redemp-
tion, never rejects his theory of strength and power. His surrender, as
Mochulsky says, “is not a sign of penitence but of pusillanimity.” We end
up with a pre-Christian tragic hero ruined by blind fate, at least in his own
vision. But this is about as unattractive as a tragic hero can be, because
Raskolnikov comes too late in cultural history to seem a Prometheus rather
than a bookish intellectual. In a Christian context, Prometheus assimilates
to Satan, and Raskolnikov’s pride begins to seem too satanic for tragedy.
Raskolnikov hardly persuades us on the level of Dostoevsky’s Christian
polemic, but psychologically he is fearsomely persuasive. Power for
Raskolnikov can be defined as the ability to kill someone else, anyone at
all, rather than oneself. I meet Raskolnikov daily, though generally not in
so extreme a form, in many young contemporaries who constitute what I
would call the School of Resentment. Their wounded narcissism, turned
against the self, might make them poets or critics; turned outward, against
others, it makes them eminent unrest-inducers. Raskolnikov does not
move our sympathy for him, but he impresses us with his uncompromising
intensity.
Novelists and Novels 157

Svidrigailov may have been intended as Raskolnikov’s foil, but he got


away from Dostoevsky, and runs off with the book, even as old Karamazov
nearly steals the greater work away from the extraordinary Dmitri.
Raskolnikov is too pure a Promethean or devil to be interested in desire,
unless the object of desire be metaphysical freedom and power. He is a
kind of ascetic Gnostic, while Svidrigailov is a libertine Gnostic, attempt-
ing to liberate the sparks upward. If Raskolnikov portrays the madness of
the Promethean will, then Svidrigailov is beyond the will, as he is beyond
the still-religious affirmations of atheism. He lives (if that can be the right
word) a negativity that Raskolnikov is too much himself to attain.
Raskolnikov killed for his own sake, he tells Sonia, to test his own strength.
Svidrigailov is light years beyond that, on the way downwards and out-
wards into the abyss, his foremother and forefather.
The best of all murder stories, Crime and Punishment seems to me
beyond praise and beyond affection. Dostoevsky doubtless would impress
me even more than he does already if I could read Russian, but I would not
like him any better. A vicious obscurantism inheres in the four great nar-
ratives, including The Idiot and The Possessed, and it darkens Crime and
Punishment. Only The Brothers Karamazov transcends Dostoevsky’s hateful
ideology because the Karamazovs sweep past the truths that the novelist
continues to shout at us. Tolstoy did not think that Dostoevsky’s final and
apocalyptic novel was one of the summits of the genre, but then he liked
to think of Dostoevsky as the Russian Harriet Beecher Stowe and would
have wanted old Karamazov to have resembled Simon Legree.
What seems to me strongest in Dostoevsky is the control of visionary
horror he shares with Blake, an imaginative prophet with whom he has
absolutely nothing else in common. No one who has read Crime and
Punishment ever can forget Raskolnikov’s murder of poor Lizaveta:

There in the middle of the floor, with a big bundle in her arms,
stood Lizaveta, as white as a sheet, gazing in frozen horror at her
murdered sister and apparently without the strength to cry out.
When she saw him run in, she trembled like a leaf and her face
twitched spasmodically; she raised her hand as if to cover her
mouth, but no scream came and she backed slowly away from him
towards the corner, with her eyes on him in a fixed stare, but still
without a sound, as though she had no breath left to cry out. He
flung himself forward with the axe; her lips writhed pitifully, like
those of a young child when it is just beginning to be frightened
and stands ready to scream, with its eyes fixed on the object of its
fear. The wretched Lizaveta was so simple, brow-beaten, and
158 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

utterly terrified that she did not even put up her arms to protect
her face, natural and almost inevitable as the gesture would have
been at this moment when the axe was brandished immediately
above it. She only raised her free left hand a little and slowly
stretched it out towards him as though she were trying to push
him away. The blow fell on her skull, splitting it open from the top
of the forehead almost to the crown of the head, and felling her
instantly. Raskolnikov, completely beside himself, snatched up her
bundle, threw it down again, and ran to the entrance.

Nothing could be more painfully effective than: “She only raised her
free left hand a little and slowly stretched it out towards him as though she
were trying to push him away.” We think of the horrible dream in which
Raskolnikov sees a poor, lean, old mare beaten to death with a crowbar,
and we may reflect upon Nietzsche’s darkest insights: that pain creates
memory, so that the pain is the meaning, and meaning is therefore painful.
Dostoevsky was a great visionary and an exuberant storyteller, but there is
something paradoxically nihilistic in his narrative visions. The sublime
mode asks us to give up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures, which
is altogether an aesthetic request. Dostoevsky belongs not to the sublime
genre but to the harsher perspectives of the apocalyptic. He insists that we
accept pains that transcend aesthetic limits. His authority at apocalypse is
beyond question, but such authority also has its own aesthetic limits.

Brothers Karamazov

For a critic who cannot read Russian, The Brothers Karamazov needs con-
siderable mediation, more perhaps than War and Peace or Fathers and Sons.
Much of this mediation is provided by Victor Terras, in his admirable com-
mentary A Karamazov Companion, to which I am indebted here.
Dostoevsky’s final novel, completed only two months before his death,
when he was nine months short of sixty, The Brothers Karamazov was
intended as Dostoevsky’s apocalypse. Its genre might best be called
Scripture rather than novel or tragedy, saga or chronicle. Dostoevsky’s
scope is from Genesis to Revelation, with the Book of Job and the Gospel
of John as the centers. Old Karamazov is a kind of Adam, dreadfully vital
and vitalistically dreadful. His four sons resist allegorical reduction, but
William Blake would have interpreted them as being his Four Zoas or liv-
ing principles of fallen man, with Ivan as Urizen, Dmitri as Luvah, Alyosha
as Los, and the bastard Smerdyakov as a very debased Tharmas. On the
model of this rather Hermetic mythology, Ivan is excessively dominated by
Novelists and Novels 159

the anxieties of the skeptical and analytic intellect, while Dmitri is culpa-
ble for “reasoning from the loins in the unreal forms of Beulah’s night” and
so is a victim of his own overly sensual affective nature. The image of
imaginative and spiritual salvation, Alyosha, is thus seen as the true
Christian visionary, while the natural—all too natural—Smerdyakov rep-
resents the drives or instincts turned murderously against the father and
against the self.
That there may be affinities between English Blake and Great Russian
Dostoevsky is itself surprising and ought not to be magnified, since the dif-
ferences between the two seers are far more serious than any parallels in
mythic projection. Despite his extraordinary powers of characterization
and representation, the Dostoevsky of Karamazov is essentially an obscu-
rantist, and Blake would have judged him to have been a greatly exalted
version of his own Smerdyakov. Tolstoy entertained outrageous moraliza-
tions about the proper modes and uses for literature, but, compared to the
author of The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy will seem an Enlightened ratio-
nalist to a Western reader at the present time. Perhaps that is only to say
that Dostoevsky is less universal than Tolstoy in spirit, less the Russian
Homer and more the Russian Dante.
The Brothers Karamazov is frequently an outrageous narrative and evi-
dently has strong parodistic elements. Its narrator is faceless; John Jones
calls him “a crowd in trousers.” His story is told with a sly artlessness,
which suits a novel whose burden is that we are all sinful, for even holy
Russia swarms with sin, with the universal desire, conscious and uncon-
scious, to murder the father. Old Karamazov is a monster, but a heroic
vitalist, fierce in his drive for women and for drink. Dostoevsky evidently
did not much care for Ivan either, and no one could care for Smerdyakov.
Yet all the Karamazovs burn with psychic energy, all are true sons of that
terrible but exuberant father. Freud’s essay “Dostoyevski and Parricide”
(1928) should be supplemented by his Totem and Taboo, because the violent
tyrant-father murdered by his sons in the Primal History Scene is akin to
old Karamazov, who also wishes to appropriate all the women for himself.
Old Karamazov is actually just fifty-five, though ancient in debauch-
ery. He could be judged a Falstaffian figure, not as Shakespeare wrote
Falstaff, but as moralizing critics too frequently view the fat knight, for-
getting his supreme wit, his joy in play, and his masterful insights into real-
ity. If Falstaff had continued the decline we observe in Henry IV, Part 2,
then he might have achieved the rancid vitality of the father of the
Karamazovs. Fyodor Pavlovich’s peculiar vice however is non-Falstaffian.
Falstaff after all is not a father, despite his longing to make Hal his son. Old
Karamazov is primarily a father, the parody indeed of a bad father, almost
160 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the Freudian primitive father of Totem and Taboo. Still, this buffoon and
insane sensualist is a fool in a complex way, almost a Shakespearean fool,
seeing through all impostures, his own included. Fyodor Pavlovich lies to
keep in practice, but his lies generally work to expose more truth. He lives
to considerable purpose, doubtless despite himself. The largest purpose, in
one of Dostoevsky’s terrible ironies, is to be the inevitable victim of patri-
cide, of his four sons’ revenge for their abused mothers.
The image of the father, for the reactionary Dostoevsky, is ultimately
also the image of the Czar and of God. Why then did Dostoevsky risk the
ghastly Fyodor Pavlovich as his testament’s vision of the father? I can only
surmise that Dostoevsky’s motivation was Jobean. If Old Karamazov is to
be our universal father, then by identifying with Dmitri, or Ivan, or
Alyosha (no one identifies with Smerdyakov!), we assume their Jobean sit-
uation. If your faith can survive the torment of seeing the image of pater-
nal authority in Karamazov, then you are as justified as Job. Reversing
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Dostoevsky persuades us that if we haven’t had
a bad enough father, then it is necessary to invent one. Old Karamazov is
an ancestor-demon rather than an ancestor-god, a darkness visible rather
than a luminous shadow. You do not mourn his murder, but as a reader you
certainly miss him when he is gone. Nor can you hate him the way you
despise the hideous Rakitin. Again, I admire John Jones’s emphasis:

The old man’s complicity in his own murder gets carried by the
book’s master metaphor. His house stinks. His life stinks. Yet his
mystic complicity never quite hardens into the judgment that he
deserves to die. His nature is too broad to allow that.

By “broad” Jones means simply just too alive to deserve to die, which
is what I myself would judge. So rammed with life is old Karamazov that
his murder is a sin against life, life depraved and corrupt, yet fierce life, life
refusing death. Even Dmitri falls short of his father’s force of desire.
Strangely like Blake again, Dostoevsky proclaims that everything that lives
is holy, though he does not share Blake’s conviction that nothing or no one
is holier than anything or anyone else.
In his Notebooks, Dostoevsky insisted that “we are all, to the last man,
Fyodor Pavloviches,” because in a new, original form “we are all nihilists.”
A reader, but for the intercessions of his superego, might like to find him-
self in Falstaff, but hardly in Fyodor Pavlovich. Yet the honest reader
should, and does, and no one wants to be murdered. As an apocalypse, The
Brothers Karamazov forces identification upon one. The father in each male
among us is compelled to some uncomfortable recognition in Old
Novelists and Novels 161

Karamazov; the son in each can choose among the three attractive broth-
ers (Zosima is hardly a possibility). It cannot be said that Dostoevsky does
as well with women; Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna may divide male
fantasy between them, but that is all. Dostoevsky does not match Tolstoy
as a portrayer of women, let alone Shakespeare.
Much of the permanent fascination of The Brothers Karamazov invests
itself in the extraordinary differences between Dmitri and Ivan, and in
Ivan’s two phantasmagorias, his “poem” of the Grand Inquisitor and his
mad confrontation with the Devil. Dmitri, though he yields us no phan-
tasmagorias, is more endless to meditation than his half-brother, Ivan.
Dostoevsky evidently saw Dmitri as the archetypal Great Russian: undisci-
plined, human—all too human, lustful, capable of all extremes, but a man
of deep feeling and compassion, and an intuitive genius, a poet of action,
an authentic comedian of the spirit, and potentially a Christian. Ivan is his
father’s son in a darker sense; turned inward, his ravening intellect destroys
a sense of other selves, and his perpetually augmenting inner self threatens
every value that Dostoevsky seeks to rescue. If Dmitri is the exemplary
Russian, then Ivan is the Western intellectual consciousness uneasily
inhabiting the Russian soul, with murderous consequences that work
themselves through in his parody, Smerdyakov.
The legend of the Grand Inquisitor has achieved a fame that tran-
scends The Brothers Karamazov as a whole, hardly a result Dostoevsky
could have endured, partly because Ivan’s parable tells us nothing about
Dmitri, who is the authentic center of the novel, and partly because, out of
context, Ivan’s prose poem can be mistaken for Dostoevsky’s, which is The
Brothers Karamazov. Ivan’s legend is one that Dostoevsky rejects, and yet
Ivan also, like Old Karamazov, is Dostoevsky, even if Dmitri is more of
Dostoevsky. The Grand Inquisitor stamps out human freedom because
humans are too weak to endure their own freedom. If Dostoevsky really
intended Zosima to be his answer to the Inquisitor, then he erred badly.
Zosima, to an American ear anyway, is a muddle, and his interpretation of
the Book of Job is the weakest failure in the history of theodicy. What is
least acceptable about the Book of Job, its tacked-on conclusion in which
God gives Job a perfect new set of sons and daughters, every bit as good as
the old, is saluted by Zosima as the height of holy wisdom. It is difficult to
answer the Grand Inquisitor with such sublime idiocy.
But then the Grand Inquisitor speaks a sublime idiocy, despite the
grand reputation that the Legend has garnered as an excerpt. Dostoevsky
is careful to distance himself and us, with the highest irony, from Ivan’s
dubious rhetoric. The Inquisitor rants on for too long, and just does not
frighten us enough; he is more Gothic than we can accept, just as Ivan’s
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Devil is too much a confused projection of Ivan. To be effective, the leg-


end of the Inquisitor should have been composed and told by Dmitri, but
then The Brothers Karamazov would have been a different and even
stronger novel.
Freud, for polemical and tendentious reasons, overrated The Brothers
Karamazov, ranking it first among all novels ever written, close to
Shakespeare in eminence, and finding the rather lurid legend of the Grand
Inquisitor to be a peak of world literature. That latter judgment is clearly
mistaken; the status of the novel among all novels whatsoever is perhaps a
touch problematic. The book’s enormous gusto is unquestionable; the
Karamazov family, father and sons, sometimes seems less an image of life,
a mimesis, and more a super-mimesis, an evocation of a more abundant life
than representation ought to be able to portray. There cannot be a more
intense consciousness than that of Dmitri in a novel; only a few figures
elsewhere can match him. Doubtless he speaks for what Dostoevsky could
not repress in himself: “If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter
Him underground.” If you wish to read “God” there as the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses and Jesus, you are justified;
you follow Dostoevsky’s intention. I am willing to read “God,” here and
elsewhere, as the desire for the transcendental and extraordinary, or
Dmitri’s and Dostoevsky’s desire for the completion of what was already
transcendental and extraordinary in themselves.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
Leo Tolstoy
(1828–1910)

N O V E L S
Anna Karenina

SCHOPENHAUER’S FIERCE VISION OF THE RAVENING WILL TO LIVE FOUND


a receptive sharer in Tolstoy, whose ferocious drives hardly needed guidance
from Schopenhauer. Anna Karenina can be called the novel of the drives,
since no other narrative that I have read centers so fully upon its protago-
nist’s being so swept away by her will to live that almost nothing else mat-
ters to her. Anna’s love for Vronsky may have its few rivals in Western liter-
ature, but I can recall no similar representation of erotic passion quite so
intense. Tolstoy, with enormous shrewdness, explains nothing about Anna’s
object-choice to us, whether in idealizing or in reductive terms. What he
does show us, with overwhelming persuasiveness, is that there is no choice
involved. Anna, vital and attractive in every way, is someone with whom
most male readers of the novel fall in love, and Tolstoy clearly loves her
almost obsessively. He would not have said that he was Anna, but she resem-
bles him rather more than Levin does, let alone Vronsky or Kitty.
Why does Anna kill herself ? Would we find it as plausible if a con-
temporary Anna emulated her? Could there be a contemporary Anna? The
questions may reduce to: Why did Tolstoy kill her? Did he mean to punish
her? I think not. Anna’s suicide saddens us, but it also relieves us from
shared suffering. Doubtless it relieved Tolstoy also, who was suffering with
her. Other legitimate questions would be: How would Schopenhauer have
received Anna’s death? Is it an heroic release, or a failure in endurance?
Tolstoy read Schopenhauer in the interval between War and Peace and
Anna Karenina, an uneasy interregnum in which he was defeated by his
attempt to write a novel about the era of Peter the Great. His enthusiasm
for Schopenhauer was essentially a reaffirmation of his own darkest

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convictions, since he had always been both an apocalyptic vitalist and a


dark moralist appalled by some of the consequences of his own vitalism.
Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, with its metaphysical status as the true thing-
in-itself, is simply the Tolstoyan natural ethos turned into prose. The Will
to Live is unitary, active, rapacious, indifferent, universal desire; one of the
most extraordinary of nineteenth-century hyperboles:

Let us now add the consideration of the human race. The matter
indeed becomes more complicated, and assumes a certain serious-
ness of aspect; but the fundamental character remains unaltered.
Here also life presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment,
but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with
this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, con-
stant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme
exertion of all the powers of body and mind. Many millions, unit-
ed into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on
account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it.
Now senseless delusions, now intriguing politics, incite them to
wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great
multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to
expiate their faults. In peace industry and trade are active, inven-
tions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected
from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All strive,
some planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the
ultimate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tor-
mented individuals through a short span of time in the most for-
tunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from
pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the
reproduction of this race and its striving. In this evident dispro-
portion between the trouble and the reward, the will to live
appears to us from this point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool,
or subjectively, as a delusion, seized by which everything living
works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that
is of no value. But when we consider it more closely, we shall find
here also that it is rather a blind pressure, a tendency entirely
without ground or motive.

If this is the characterization of the Will to Live, then the metaphysics


of the love of the sexes will reduce to a kind of treason:

In between, however, in the midst of the tumult, we see the


Novelists and Novels 165

glances of two lovers meet longingly: yet why so secretly, fearful-


ly, and stealthily? Because these lovers are the traitors who seek to
perpetuate the whole want and drudgery, which would otherwise
speedily reach an end; this they wish to frustrate, as others like
them have frustrated it before.

Schopenhauer presumably would have found this exemplified as much


by Levin and Kitty as by Vronsky and Anna, but there he and Tolstoy part,
as even Tolstoy is a touch saner upon the metaphysics of sexual love. What
matters most about Anna, at least to the reader, is her intensity, her will to
live (I deliberately remove the Schopenhauerian capitalization). Anna’s
aura renders her first meeting with Vronsky unforgettable for us:

Vronsky followed the guard to the Carriage, and had to stop at the
entrance of the compartment to let a lady pass out.
The trained insight of a Society man enabled Vronsky with a
single glance to decide that she belonged to the best Society. He
apologized for being in her way and was about to enter the car-
riage, but felt compelled to have another look at her, not because
she was very beautiful nor because of the elegance and modest
grace of her whole figure, but because he saw in her sweet face as
she passed him something specially tender and kind. When he
looked round she too turned her head. Her bright grey eyes which
seemed dark because of their black lashes rested for a moment on
his face as if recognizing him, and then turned to the passing
crowd evidently in search of some one. In that short look Vronsky
had time to notice the subdued animation that enlivened her face
and seemed to flutter between her bright eyes and a scarcely per-
ceptible smile which curved her rosy lips. It was as if an excess of
vitality so filled her whole being that it betrayed itself against her
will, now in her smile, now in the light of her eyes. She deliber-
ately tried to extinguish that light in her eyes, but it shone despite
of her in her faint smile.

A benign vitality, however excessive, is what Tolstoy recognized in


himself. What he teaches himself in this novel is that a vitality so exuber-
ant transcends benignity as it does every other quality. The brief but over-
whelming chapter 11 of part 2 is not only the novel in embryo, and the
essence of Anna, but it is also, to me, the most revelatory scene that Tolstoy
ever wrote:
166 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

That which for nearly a year had been Vronsky’s sole and exclu-
sive desire, supplanting all his former desires: that which for Anna
had been an impossible, dreadful, but all the more bewitching
dream of happiness, had come to pass. Pale, with trembling lower
jaw, he stood over her, entreating her to be calm, himself not
knowing why or how.
“Anna, Anna,” he said in a trembling voice, “Anna, for God’s
sake! ...”
But the louder he spoke the lower she drooped her once proud,
bright, but now shame-stricken head, and she writhed, slipping
down from the sofa on which she sat to the floor at his feet. She
would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.
“My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing and pressing
Vronsky’s hand to her breast.
She felt so guilty, so much to blame, that it only remained for
her to humble herself and ask to be forgiven; but she had no one in
the world now except him, so that even her prayer for forgiveness
was addressed to him. Looking at him, she felt her humiliation
physically, and could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer
must feel when looking at the body he has deprived of life. The
body he had deprived of life was their love, the first period of their
love. There was something frightful and revolting in the recollec-
tion of what had been paid for with this terrible price of shame.
The shame she felt at her spiritual nakedness communicated itself
to him. But in spite of the murderer’s horror of the body of his vic-
tim, that body must be cut in pieces and hidden away, and he must
make use of what he has obtained by the murder.
Then, as the murderer desperately throws himself on the body,
as though with passion, and drags it and hacks it, so Vronsky cov-
ered her face and shoulders with kisses.
She held his hand and did not move. Yes! These kisses were
what had been bought by that shame! “Yes, and this hand, which
will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted his
hand and kissed it. He knelt down and tried to see her face, but
she hid it and did not speak. At last, as though mastering herself,
she sat up and pushed him away. Her face was as beautiful as ever,
but all the more piteous.
“It’s all over,” she said. “I have nothing but you left. Remember
that.”
“I cannot help remembering what is life itself to me! For one
moment of that bliss ...”
Novelists and Novels 167

“What bliss?” she said with disgust and horror, and the horror
was involuntarily communicated to him. “For heaven’s sake, not
another word.”
She rose quickly and moved away from him.
“Not another word!” she repeated, and with a look of cold
despair, strange to him, she left him. She felt that at that moment
she could not express in words her feeling of shame, joy, and hor-
ror at this entrance on a new life, and she did not wish to vulgar-
ize that feeling by inadequate words. Later on, the next day and
the next, she still could not even find words to describe all the
complexity of those feelings, and could not even find thoughts
with which to reflect on all that was in her soul.
She said to herself: “No, I can’t think about it now; later, when
I am calmer.” But that calm, necessary for reflection, never came.
Every time the thought of what she had done, and of what was to
become of her and of what she should do, came to her mind, she
was seized with horror and drove these thoughts away.
“Not now; later, when I am calmer!” she said to herself.
But in her dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts,
her position appeared to her in all its shocking nakedness. One
dream she had almost every night. She dreamt that both at once
were her husbands, and lavished their caresses on her. Alexey
Alexandrovich wept, kissing her hands, saying: “How beautiful it
is now!” and Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he also was her
husband. And she was surprised that formerly this had seemed
impossible to her, and laughingly explained to them how much
simpler it really was, and that they were both now contented and
happy. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she
woke from it filled with horror.

Abruptly, without even an overt hint of the nature of the consumma-


tion, Tolstoy places us after the event. Anna’s tragedy, and in some sense
Tolstoy’s own, is implicit in this majestic scene. Poor Vronsky, at once vic-
tim and executioner, is hopelessly inadequate to Anna’s intensity. There is
of course nothing he can say and nothing he can do, because he is the
wrong man, and always will be. But who could have been the right man?
Levin? Perhaps, but Tolstoy and life (the two are one) would not have it so.
The calm, necessary for reflection, might have come to Anna with Levin,
yet that is highly doubtful. Tolstoy himself, her double and brother, her
psychic twin, would have been inadequate to Anna, and she to him. Anna’s
dream, with both Alexeys happy as her joint husbands, is a peculiar horror
168 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

to her, because it so horrified Tolstoy. The outrage expressed by D.H.


Lawrence at what he judged to be Tolstoy’s murder of Anna might have
been mitigated had Lawrence allowed himself to remember that Tolstoy,
nearly thirty-five years after Anna, also died in a railroad station.
“Characters like Anna are tragic figures because, for reasons that are
admirable, they cannot live divided lives or survive through repression.”
That sentence of Martin Price’s is the best I have read about Anna, but I
wonder if Anna can be called a tragic figure, any more than she can be what
Schopenhauer grimly would have called her, a traitor. Tragedy depends
upon division and repression, and Anna is betrayed by nature itself, which
does not create men as vital as herself, or, if it does, creates them as savage
moralists, like Tolstoy. Anna is too integral for tragedy, and too imbued
with reality to survive in any social malforming of reality whatsoever. She
dies because Tolstoy could not sustain the suffering it would have cost him
to imagine a life she could have borne to go on living.
N O V E L I S T S
Mark Twain

A N D
(1835–1910)

N O V E L S
Huckleberry Finn

MARK TWAIN’S GREATNESS IS CENTERED IN THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY


Finn, and in the best of his shorter tales. By common consent, Huckleberry Finn
belongs to a very select group of American novels: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Light in August. Later additions to
that tenfold might well include Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man, Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away,
Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s
Theater, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian. Taking the eighteen books together, if I could have just one
on the proverbial desert island, it would have to be The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Its only true rival as the one, essential American book
would be Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Twain and Whitman between them
best define what is uniquely American about American literature.
Huck Finn, like the “Walt Whitman” of Song of Myself, is an authentic
American Original. As with Walt, Huck is Adam early in the morning, a
fresh start in the Evening Land that is the United States. European man is
fallen; Huck and Walt, each free of Original Sin, light out for the territory
and stop somewhere up ahead of us, perhaps still waiting to see if we can
catch up to them. We never will, but that only augments their value. They
represent freedom (and loneliness), which according to Emerson is a kind
of wildness. And they are undying; Huck in particular need never dwindle
into the compromises of old age.

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Walt Whitman (the poet, not so much the character) hymned the ulti-
mate unity of night, death, the mother, and the sea. Huck is motherless,
and rightly fears any return visits of his dreadful father. Twain hymns for
him instead a unity of night, freedom, and the river, all as emblems of vital-
ity. What we care for most in Huck is his comic decency and his vision of
reality, in which fear yields to the pragmatic courage of always going on.
Hemingway’s protagonists, cultivating their style of grace under pressure,
seem to me only parodies of Huck Finn, whose inwardness transcends any
question of style.
Mark Twain, like most great comic writers, is never far away from rep-
resenting a fundamental savagery in human nature and human society.
Huck, a grand survivor, is the representation of the opposite of savagery.
Cruelty and hatred form no part of his vision. His self-reliance and self-
esteem are Twain’s closest approach to transcendence. No other figure in
our novelistic tradition is as likable or as influential as Huckleberry Finn.
N O V E L I S T S
Émile Zola

A N D
(1840–1902)

N O V E L S
Thérèse Raquin

TIME HALLOWS ZOLA’S GREATNESS, AS NOVELIST AND AS PERSON, THOUGH


increasingly we see that he transcended his naturalistic aesthetic. Frederick
Brown, his crucial scholar-critic, surmises that the novelist’s death at sixty-
two, by asphyxiation, may have been murder, a final revenge by the proto-
Fascist anti-Dreyfusards against the leader of those who had exonerated
Dreyfus.
Zola, far more even than Balzac, needs to be read in bulk: no single
novel carries his full greatness, not even the sequence of L’Assommoir
(1877), Nana (1880), Pot-Bouille (1882), Germinal (1885), La Terre (1887),
Le Rêve (1888), La Bête humaine (1890), Le Débâcle (1892), and Le Docteur
Pascal (1893). Those nine carry through his “Master Plan”, as set forth by
Frederick Brown in a chapter of his Zola: A Life (1995), which I have
reprinted in this volume.
Here I wish to consider only Thérèse Raquin, the starting-point of his
art, published in 1867, and written when he was just twenty-six, strongly
influenced by Balzac, and perhaps also by Stendhal and by Victor Hugo.
Defending his novel in a preface to the second edition (1868), Zola fierce-
ly absolves himself of all charges of immorality and pornography:

In Thérèse Raquin my aim has been to study temperaments and not


characters. That is the whole point of the book. I have chosen peo-
ple completely dominated by their nerves and blood, without free
will, drawn into each action of their lives by the inexorable laws of
their physical nature. Thérèse and Laurent are human animals,
nothing more. I have endeavoured to follow these animals through

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the devious working of their passions, the compulsion of their


instincts, and the mental unbalance resulting from a nervous cri-
sis. The sexual adventures of my hero and heroine are the satis-
faction of a need, the murder they commit a consequence of their
adultery, a consequence they accept just as wolves accept the
slaughter of sheep. And finally, what I have had to call their
remorse really amounts to a simple organic disorder, a revolt of
the nervous system when strained to breaking-point. There is a
complete absence of soul, I freely admit, since that is how I meant
it to be.

A disciple of Taine, Zola calls his enterprise “scientific”, or “sociolog-


ical” in our current language. Hippolyte Taine himself, though he admired
the novel, urged Zola to work on a more panoramic scale. It is true Thérèse
Raquin is a closed-in nightmare; Brown usefully stresses that Zola’s own
recurrent nightmare was to be buried alive, as in Poe’s dreadful fantasy.
The novel is the story of the half Algerian Thérèse, her sickly husband
whom she does not love, and of Laurent, her lover, who murders the weak
husband, Camille, by pushing him into the Seine. The result is the victim’s
triumph over his murderers, who eventually share the same glass of poison.
The novel remains grimly memorable, and far more of a phantas-
magoric than a realistic work. Though it failed to gain Zola a public, it is
a presage of a greatness to come. Like so much of Nineteenth Century
“realism” and “naturalism”, Zola seems now a visionary fantasist, akin to
the sublime Balzac.
N O V E L I S T S
Thomas Hardy

A N D
(1840–1928)

N O V E L S
The Mayor of Casterbridge

FOR ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, THE WILL TO LIVE WAS THE TRUE THING-
in-itself, not an interpretation but a rapacious, active, universal, and ulti-
mately indifferent drive or desire. Schopenhauer’s great work, The World as
Will and Representation, had the same relation to and influence upon many
of the principal nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists that
Freud’s writings have in regard to many of this century’s later, crucial mas-
ters of prose fiction. Zola, Maupassant, Turgenev, and Tolstoy join Thomas
Hardy as Schopenhauer’s nineteenth-century heirs, in a tradition that goes
on through Proust, Conrad, and Thomas Mann to culminate in aspects of
Borges and of Beckett, the most eminent living writer of narrative. Since
Schopenhauer (despite Freud’s denials) was one of Freud’s prime precur-
sors, one could argue that aspects of Freud’s influence upon writers simply
carry on from Schopenhauer’s previous effect. Manifestly, the relation of
Schopenhauer to Hardy is different in both kind and degree from the larg-
er sense in which Schopenhauer was Freud’s forerunner or Wittgenstein’s.
A poet-novelist like Hardy turns to a rhetorical speculator like
Schopenhauer only because he finds something in his own temperament
and sensibility confirmed and strengthened, and not at all as Lucretius
turned to Epicurus, or as Whitman was inspired by Emerson.
The true precursor for Hardy was Shelley, whose visionary skepticism
permeates the novels as well as the poems and The Dynasts. There is some
technical debt to George Eliot in the early novels, but Hardy in his depths
was little more moved by her than by Wilkie Collins, from whom he also

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learned elements of craft. Shelley’s tragic sense of eros is pervasive


throughout Hardy, and ultimately determines Hardy’s understanding of
his strongest heroines: Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye, Marty South,
Tess Durbeyfield, Sue Bridehead. Between desire and fulfillment in
Shelley falls the shadow of the selfhood, a shadow that makes love and
what might be called the means of love quite irreconcilable. What M.D.
Zabel named as “the aesthetic of incongruity” in Hardy and ascribed to
temperamental causes is in a profound way the result of attempting to
transmute the procedures of The Revolt of Islam and Epipsychidion into the
supposedly naturalistic novel.
J. Hillis Miller, when he worked more in the mode of a critic of con-
sciousness like Georges Poulet than in the deconstruction of Paul de Man
and Jacques Derrida, saw the fate of love in Hardy as being darkened
always by a shadow cast by the lover’s consciousness itself. Hugh Kenner,
with a distaste for Hardy akin to (and perhaps derived from) T.S. Eliot’s in
After Strange Gods, suggested that Miller had created a kind of Proustian
Hardy, who turns out to be a case rather than an artist. Hardy was certainly
not an artist comparable to Henry James (who dismissed him as a mere
imitator of George Eliot) or James Joyce, but the High Modernist shibbo-
leths for testing the novel have now waned considerably, except for a few
surviving high priests of Modernism like Kenner. A better guide to Hardy’s
permanent strength as a novelist was his heir D.H. Lawrence, whose The
Rainbow and Women in Love marvelously brought Hardy’s legacy to an
apotheosis. Lawrence, praising Hardy with a rebel son’s ambivalence, asso-
ciated him with Tolstoy as a tragic writer:

And this is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers,
Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small
action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature;
setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formu-
lated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncompre-
hended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself,
surpassing human consciousness. The difference is, that whereas
in Shakespeare or Sophocles the greater, uncomprehended moral-
ity, or fate, is actively transgressed and gives active punishment, in
Hardy and Tolstoi the lesser, human morality, the mechanical sys-
tem is actively transgressed, and holds, and punishes the protago-
nist, whilst the greater morality is only passively, negatively trans-
gressed, it is represented merely as being present in background,
in scenery, not taking any active part, having no direct connexion
with the protagonist. Oedipus, Hamlet, Macbeth set themselves
Novelists and Novels 175

up against, or find themselves set up against, the unfathomed


moral forces of nature, and out of this unfathomed force comes
their death. Whereas Anna Karenina, Eustacia, Tess, Sue, and
Jude find themselves up against the established system of human
government and morality, they cannot detach themselves, and are
brought down. Their real tragedy is that they are unfaithful to the
greater unwritten morality, which would have bidden Anna
Karenina be patient and wait until she, by virtue of greater right,
could take what she needed from society; would have bidden
Vronsky detach himself from the system, become an individual,
creating a new colony of morality with Anna; would have bidden
Eustacia fight Clym for his own soul, and Tess take and claim her
Angel, since she had the greater light; would have bidden Jude and
Sue endure for very honour’s sake, since one must bide by the best
that one has known, and not succumb to the lesser good.
(“Study of Thomas Hardy”)

This seems to me powerful and just, because it catches what is most


surprising and enduring in Hardy’s novels—the sublime stature and aes-
thetic dignity of his crucial protagonists—while exposing also his great
limitation, his denial of freedom to his best personages. Lawrence’s pre-
scription for what would have saved Eustacia and Clym, Tess and Angel,
Sue and Jude, is perhaps not as persuasive. He speaks of them as though
they were Gudrun and Gerald, and thus have failed to be Ursula and
Birkin. It is Hardy’s genius that they are what they had to be: as imperfect
as their creator and his vision, as impure as his language and his plotting,
and finally painful and memorable to us:

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,


Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

II

Of Hardy’s major novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is the least flawed


and clearly the closest to tragic convention in Western literary tradition. If
one hesitates to prefer it to The Return of the Native, Tess, or Jude, that may
be because it is the least original and eccentric work of the four. Henchard
is certainly the best articulated and most consistent of Hardy’s male per-
sonages, but Lucetta is no Eustacia, and the amiable Elizabeth Jane does
not compel much of the reader’s interest. The book’s glory, Henchard, is
176 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

so massive a self-punisher that he can be said to leap over the psychic cos-
mos of Schopenhauer directly into that of Freud’s great essay on the eco-
nomics of masochism, with its grim new category of “moral masochism.”
In a surprising way, Hardy reverses, through Henchard, one of the princi-
pal topoi of Western tragedy, as set forth acutely by Northrop Frye:

A strong element of demonic ritual in public punishments and


similar mob amusements is exploited by tragic and ironic myth.
Breaking on the wheel becomes Lear’s wheel of fire; bear-baiting
is an image for Gloucester and Macbeth, and for the crucified
Prometheus the humiliation of exposure, the horror of being
watched, is a greater misery than the pain. Derkou theama (behold
the spectacle; get your staring over with) is his bitterest cry. The
inability of Milton’s blind Samson to stare back is his greatest tor-
ment, and one which forces him to scream at Delilah, in one of the
most terrible passages of all tragic drama, that he will tear her to
pieces if she touches him.

For Henchard “the humiliation of exposure” becomes a terrible pas-


sion, until at last he makes an exhibition of himself during a royal visit.
Perhaps he can revert to what Frye calls “the horror of being watched”
only when he knows that the gesture involved will be his last. Hence his
Will, which may be the most powerful prose passage that Hardy ever
wrote:

They stood in silence while he ran into the cottage; returning in a


moment with a crumpled scrap of paper. On it there was pencilled
as follows:—
“MICHAEL HENCHARD’S WILL
“That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made
to grieve on account of me.
“& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.
“& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
“& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
“& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
“& that no flours be planted on my grave.
“& that no man remember me.
“To this I put my name.
“Michael Henchard.”

That dark testament is the essence of Henchard. It is notorious that


Novelists and Novels 177

“tragedy” becomes a very problematical form in the European


Enlightenment and afterwards. Romanticism, which has been our contin-
uous Modernism from the mid-1740s to the present moment, did not
return the tragic hero to us, though from Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe
until now we have received many resurgences of the tragic heroine. Hardy
and Ibsen can be judged to have come closest to reviving the tragic hero,
in contradistinction to the hero-villain who, throughout Romantic tradi-
tion, limns his night-piece and judges it to have been his best. Henchard,
despite his blind strength and his terrible errors, is no villain, and as read-
ers we suffer with him, unrelievedly, because our sympathy for him is
unimpeded.
Unfortunately, the suffering becomes altogether too unrelieved, as it
does again with Jude Fawley. Rereading The Mayor of Casterbridge is less
painful than rereading Jude the Obscure, since at least we do not have to
contemplate little Father Time hanging the other urchins and himself, but
it is still very painful indeed. Whether or not tragedy should possess some
catharsis, we resent the imposition of too much pathos upon us, and we
need some gesture of purification if only to keep us away from our own
defensive ironies. Henchard, alas, accomplishes nothing, for himself or for
others. Ahab, a great hero-villain, goes down fighting his implacable fate,
the whiteness of the whale, but Henchard is a self-destroyer to no purpose.
And yet we are vastly moved by him and know that we should be. Why?
The novel’s full title is The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge:
A Story of a Man of Character. As Robert Louis Stevenson said in a note to
Hardy, “Henchard is a great fellow,” which implies that he is a great per-
sonality rather than a man of character. This is, in fact, how Hardy repre-
sents Henchard, and the critic R.H. Hutton was right to be puzzled by
Hardy’s title, in a review published in The Spectator on June 5, 1886:

Mr. Hardy has not given us any more powerful study than that of
Michael Henchard. Why he should especially term his hero in his
title-page a “man of character,” we do not clearly understand.
Properly speaking, character is the stamp graven on a man, and
character therefore, like anything which can be graven, and which,
when graven, remains, is a word much more applicable to that
which has fixity and permanence, than to that which is fitful and
changeful, and which impresses a totally different image of itself
on the wax of plastic circumstance at one time, from that which it
impresses on a similarly plastic surface at another time. To keep
strictly to the associations from which the word “character” is
derived, a man of character ought to suggest a man of steady and
178 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

unvarying character, a man who conveys very much the same con-
ception of his own qualities under one set of circumstances, which
he conveys under another. This is true of many men, and they
might be called men of character par excellence. But the essence of
Michael Henchard is that he is a man of large nature and depth of
passion, who is yet subject to the most fitful influences, who can
do in one mood acts of which he will never cease to repent in
almost all his other moods, whose temper of heart changes many
times even during the execution of the same purpose, though the
same ardour, the same pride, the same wrathful magnanimity, the
same inability to carry out in cool blood the angry resolve of the
mood of revenge or scorn, the same hasty unreasonableness, and
the same disposition to swing back to an equally hasty reasonable-
ness, distinguish him throughout. In one very good sense, the
great deficiency of Michael Henchard might be said to be in
“character.” It might well be said that with a little more character,
with a little more fixity of mind, with a little more power of recov-
ering himself when he was losing his balance, his would have been
a nature of gigantic mould; whereas, as Mr. Hardy’s novel is meant
to show, it was a nature which ran mostly to waste. But, of course,
in the larger and wider sense of the word “character,” that sense
which has less reference to the permanent definition of the stamp,
and more reference to the confidence with which the varying
moods may be anticipated, it is not inadmissible to call Michael
Henchard a “man of character.” Still, the words on the title-page
rather mislead. One looks for the picture of a man of much more
constancy of purpose, and much less tragic mobility of mood, than
Michael Henchard. None the less, the picture is a very vivid one,
and almost magnificent in its fullness of expression. The largeness
of his nature, the unreasonable generosity and suddenness of his
friendships, the depth of his self-humiliation for what was evil in
him, the eagerness of his craving for sympathy, the vehemence of
his impulses both for good and evil, the curious dash of stoicism
in a nature so eager for sympathy, and of fortitude in one so
moody and restless,—all these are lineaments which, mingled
together as Mr. Hardy has mingled them, produce a curiously
strong impression of reality, as well as of homely grandeur.

One can summarize Hutton’s point by saying that Henchard is


stronger in pathos than in ethos, and yet ethos is the daimon, character is
fate, and Hardy specifically sets out to show that Henchard’s character is
Novelists and Novels 179

his fate. The strength of Hardy’s irony is that it is also life’s irony, and will
become Sigmund Freud’s irony: Henchard’s destiny demonstrates that
there are no accidents, meaning that nothing happens to one that is not
already oneself. Henchard stares out at the night as though he were star-
ing at an adversary, but there is nothing out there. There is only the self
turned against the self, only the drive, beyond the pleasure principle, to
death.
The pre-Socratic aphorism that character is fate seems to have been
picked up by Hardy from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, where it is
attributed to Novalis. But Hardy need not have gleaned it from anywhere
in particular. Everyone in Hardy’s novels is overdetermined by his or her
past, because for Hardy, as for Freud, everything that is dreadful has
already happened and there never can be anything absolutely new. Such a
speculation belies the very word “novel,” and certainly was no aid to
Hardy’s inventiveness. Nothing that happens to Henchard surprises us.
His fate is redeemed from dreariness only by its aesthetic dignity, which
returns us to the problematical question of Hardy’s relation to tragedy as a
literary form.
Henchard is burdened neither with wisdom nor with knowledge; he is
a man of will and of action, with little capacity for reflection, but with a
spirit perpetually open and generous towards others. J. Hillis Miller sees
him as being governed erotically by mediated desire, but since Miller sees
this as the iron law in Hardy’s erotic universe, it loses any particular force
as an observation upon Henchard. I would prefer to say that Henchard,
more even than most men and like all women in Hardy, is hungry for love,
desperate for some company in the void of existence. D.H. Lawrence read
the tragedy of Hardy’s figures not as the consequence of mediated desire,
but as the fate of any desire that will not be bounded by convention and
community.

This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy of those
who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness, whither
they had escaped for free action, after having left the walled secu-
rity, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established con-
vention. This is the theme of novel after novel: remain quite with-
in the convention, and you are good, safe, and happy in the long
run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your
side: or, on the other hand, be passionate, individual, wilful, you
will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will
escape, and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to
bear the isolation and the exposure, or by direct revenge from the
180 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

community, or from both. This is the tragedy, and only this: it is


nothing more metaphysical than the division of a man against
himself in such a way: first, that he is a member of the communi-
ty, and must, upon his honour, in no way move to disintegrate the
community, either in its moral or its practical form; second, that
the convention of the community is a prison to his natural, indi-
vidual desire, a desire that compels him, whether he feel justified
or not, to break the bounds of the community, lands him outside
the pale, there to stand alone, and say: “I was right, my desire was
real and inevitable; if I was to be myself I must fulfil it, convention
or no convention,” or else, there to stand alone, doubting, and
saying: “Was I right, was I wrong? If I was wrong, oh, let me
die!”—in which case he courts death.
The growth and the development of this tragedy, the deeper
and deeper realisation of this division and this problem, the com-
ing towards some conclusion, is the one theme of the Wessex nov-
els.
(“Study of Thomas Hardy”)

This is general enough to be just, but not quite specific enough for the
self-destructive Henchard. Also not sufficiently specific is the sympathetic
judgment of Irving Howe, who speaks of “Henchard’s personal struggle—
the struggle of a splendid animal trying to escape a trap and thereby entan-
gling itself all the more.” I find more precise the dark musings of Sigmund
Freud, Hardy’s contemporary, who might be thinking of Michael
Henchard when he meditates upon “The Economic Problem in
Masochism”:

The third form of masochism, the moral type, is chiefly remark-


able for having loosened its connection with what we recognize to
be sexuality. To all other masochistic sufferings there still clings
the condition that it should be administered by the loved person;
it is endured at his command; in the moral type of masochism this
limitation has been dropped. It is the suffering itself that matters;
whether the sentence is cast by a loved or by an indifferent person
is of no importance; it may even be caused by impersonal forces or
circumstances, but the true masochist always holds out his cheek
wherever he sees a chance of receiving a blow.

The origins of “moral masochism” are in an unconscious sense of


guilt, a need for punishment that transcends actual culpability. Even
Novelists and Novels 181

Henchard’s original and grotesque “crime,” his drunken exploit in wife-


selling, does not so much engender in him remorse at the consciousness of
wrongdoing, but rather helps engulf him in the “guilt” of the moral
masochist. That means Henchard knows his guilt not as affect or emotion
but as a negation, as the nullification of his desires and his ambitions. In a
more than Freudian sense, Henchard’s primal ambivalence is directed
against himself, against the authority principle in his own self.
If The Mayor of Casterbridge is a less original book than Tess or Jude, it
is also a more persuasive and universal vision than Hardy achieved else-
where. Miguel de Unamuno, defining the tragic sense of life, remarked
that: “The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go
to weep in common. A miserere sung in common by a multitude torment-
ed by destiny has as much value as a philosophy.” That is not tragedy as
Aristotle defined it, but it is tragedy as Thomas Hardy wrote it.

The Return of the Native

I first read The Return of the Native when I was about fifteen, forty years
ago, and had reread it in whole or in part several times through the years
before rereading it now. What I had remembered most vividly then I am
likely to remember again: Eustacia, Venn the red man, the Heath. I had
almost forgotten Clym, and his mother, and Thomasin, and Wildeve, and
probably will forget them again. Clym, in particular, is a weak failure in
characterization, and nearly sinks the novel; indeed ought to capsize any
novel whatsoever. Yet The Return of the Native survives him, even though
its chief glory, the sexually enchanting Eustacia Vye, does not. Her suicide
is so much the waste of a marvelous woman (or representation of a woman,
if you insist upon being a formalist) that the reader finds Clym even more
intolerable than he is, and is likely not to forgive Hardy, except that Hardy
clearly suffers the loss quite as much as any reader does.
Eustacia underwent a singular transformation during the novel’s com-
position, from a daemonic sort of female Byron, or Byronic witch-like
creature, to the grandly beautiful, discontented, and human—all too
human but hardly blameworthy—heroine, who may be the most desirable
woman in all of nineteenth-century British fiction. “A powerful personali-
ty uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objec-
tive beliefs; unhampered by any ideas”—it would be a good description of
Eustacia, but is actually Hardy himself through the eyes of T.S. Eliot in
After Strange Gods, where Hardy is chastised for not believing in Original
Sin and deplored also because “at times his style touches sublimity without
ever having passed through the stage of being good.”
182 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Here is Eustacia in the early “Queen of Night” chapter:

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without rud-


diness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see
her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness
enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like night-
fall extinguishing the western glow.
Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could
always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was
brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the
Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Egdon banks, any of its
thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft
of the large Ulex Europaeus—which will act as a sort of hair-
brush—she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second
time.
She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light,
as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by
their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was
much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled
her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so: she might have
been believed capable of sleeping without closing them up.
Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences,
you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like. The
sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils gave the same impres-
sion.

Hardy’s Eustacia may owe something to Walter Pater’s The


Renaissance, published five years before The Return of the Native, since in
some ways she makes a third with Pater’s evocations of the Botticelli Venus
and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, visions of antithetical female sexuality.
Eustacia’s flame-like quality precisely recalls Pater’s ecstasy of passion in
the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, and the epigraph to The Return of the
Native could well have been:

This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concur-
rence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting soon-
er or later on their ways.

This at least of flame-like Eustacia’s life has, that the concurrence of


forces parts sooner rather than later. But then this most beautiful of
Hardy’s women is also the most doom-eager, the color of her soul being
Novelists and Novels 183

flame-like. The Heath brings her only Wildeve and Clym, but Paris
doubtless would have brought her scarce better, since as Queen of Night
she attracts the constancy and the kindness of sorrow.
If Clym and Wildeve are bad actors, and they are, what about Egdon
Heath? On this, critics are perpetually divided, some finding the landscape
sublime, while others protest that its representation is bathetic. I myself am
divided, since clearly it is both, and sometimes simultaneously so! Though
Eustacia hates it fiercely, it is nearly as Shelleyan as she is, and rather less
natural than presumably it ought to be. That it is more overwritten than
overgrown is palpable:

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon,


between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach
nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heath-
land which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to
know that everything around and underneath had been from pre-
historic times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the
mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.
The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the
sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old?
Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year,
in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the
rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.
Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by
weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits.
With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged bar-
row presently to be referred to—themselves almost crystallized to
natural products by long continuance—even the trifling irregular-
ities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained
as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.

Even Melville cannot always handle this heightened mode; Hardy


rarely can, although he attempts it often. And yet we do remember Egdon
Heath, years after reading the novel, possibly because something about it
wounds us even as it wounds Eustacia. We remember also Diggory Venn,
not as the prosperous burgher he becomes, but as we first encounter him,
permeated by the red ochre of his picturesque trade:

The decayed officer, by degrees, came up alongside his fellow-


wayfarer, and wished him good evening. The reddleman turned
his head and replied in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and
184 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

his face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome


that nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really
was so in its natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely
through his stain, was in itself attractive—keen as that of a bird of
prey, and blue as autumn mist. He had neither whisker nor mous-
tache, which allowed the soft curves of the lower part of his face
to be apparent. His lips were thin, and though, as it seemed, com-
pressed by thought, there was a pleasant twitch at their corners
now and then. He was clothed throughout in a tight-fitting suit of
corduroy, excellent in quality, not much worn, and well-chosen for
its purpose; but deprived of its original colour by his trade. It
showed to advantage the good shape of his figure. A certain well-
to-do air about the man suggested that he was not poor for his
degree. The natural query of an observer would have been, Why
should such a promising being as this have hidden his prepossess-
ing exterior by adopting that singular occupation?

Hardy had intended Venn to disappear mysteriously forever from


Egdon Heath, instead of marrying Thomasin, but yielded to the anxiety of
giving the contemporary reader something cheerful and normative at the
end of his austere and dark novel. He ought to have kept to his intent, but
perhaps it does not matter. The Heath endures, the red man either van-
ishes or is transmogrified into a husband and a burgher. Though we see
Clym rather uselessly preaching to all comers as the book closes, our spir-
its are elsewhere, with the wild image of longing that no longer haunts the
Heath, Hardy’s lost Queen of Night.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Of all the novels of Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles now appeals to the widest
audience. The book’s popularity with the common reader has displaced the
earlier ascendancy of The Return of the Native. It can even be asserted that
Hardy’s novel has proved to be prophetic of a sensibility by no means fully
emergent in 1891. Nearly a century later, the book sometimes seems to
have moments of vision that are contemporary with us. These tend to come
from Hardy’s intimate sympathy with his heroine, a sympathy that verges
upon paternal love. It is curious that Hardy is more involved with Tess than
with Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure, even though Jude is closer to being
Hardy’s surrogate than any other male figure in the novels.
J. Hillis Miller, in the most advanced critical study yet attempted of
less, reads it as “a story about repetition,” but by “repetition” Miller
Novelists and Novels 185

appears to mean a linked chain of interpretations. A compulsion to inter-


pret may be the reader’s share, and may be Hardy’s own stance towards his
own novel (and perhaps even extends to Angel Clare’s role in the book),
but seems to me fairly irrelevant to Tess herself. Since the novel is a story
about Tess, I cannot regard it as being “about” repetition, or even one that
concerns a difference in repetitions. Hardy’s more profound ironies are
neither classical nor Romantic, but Biblical, as Miller himself discerns.
Classical irony turns upon contrasts between what is said and what is
meant, while Romantic irony inhabits the gap between expectation and
fulfillment. But Biblical irony appears whenever giant incongruities clash,
which happens when Yahweh, who is incommensurate, is closely juxta-
posed to men and women and their vain imaginings. When Yahweh
devours roast calf under the terebinths at Mamre, or when Jacob wrestles
with a nameless one among the Elohim at Penuel, then we are confronted
by an irony neither classical nor Romantic.
Hardy, like his master Shelley, is an unbeliever who remains within the
literary context of the Bible, and again like Shelley he derives his mode of
prophetic irony from the Bible. A striking instance (noted by Hillis Miller)
comes in chapter 11:

In the meantime Alec d’Urberville had pushed on up the slope to


clear his genuine doubt as to the quarter of The Chase they were
in. He had, in fact, ridden quite at random for over an hour, tak-
ing any turning that came to hand in order to prolong compan-
ionship with her, and giving far more attention to Tess’s moonlit
person than to any wayside object. A little rest for the jaded ani-
mal being desirable, he did not hasten his search for landmarks. A
clamber over the hill into the adjoining vale brought him to the
fence of a highway whose contours he recognized, which settled
the question of their whereabouts. D’Urberville thereupon turned
back; but by this time the moon had quite gone down, and partly
on account of the fog The Chase was wrapped in thick darkness,
although morning was not far off. He was obliged to advance with
outstretched hands to avoid contact with the boughs, and discov-
ered that to hit the exact spot from which he had started was at
first entirely beyond him. Roaming up and down, round and
round, he at length heard a slight movement of the horse close at
hand; and the sleeve of his overcoat unexpectedly caught his foot.
“Tess!” said d’Urberville.
There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he
could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet,
186 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the
dead leaves. Everything else was blackness alike. D’Urberville
stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent
lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek
was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her
eyelashes there lingered tears.
Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them
rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which were
poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole
the hopping rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was
Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple
faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite
spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey,
or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as
gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have
been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why
so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the
woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of ana-
lytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order. One
may, indeed, admit the possibility of a retribution lurking in the
present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d’Urberville’s mailed
ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure
even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time. But
though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a
morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average
human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.
As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of
saying among each other in their fatalistic way: “It was to be.”
There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to
divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self
of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at
Trantridge poultry-farm.

The ironical Tishbite is the savage Elijah the prophet, who mocks the
priests of Baal, urging them: “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talk-
ing, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth,
and must be awaked.” Elijah’s irony depends upon the incommensurate-
ness of Yahweh and the human—all too human—Baal. Hardy’s irony can-
not be what Hillis Miller deconstructively wishes it to be when he rather
remarkably suggests that Tess herself is “like the prophets of Baal,” nor
Novelists and Novels 187

does it seem right to call Yahweh’s declaration that He is a jealous (or zeal-
ous) God “the divine lust for vengeance,” as Miller does. Yahweh, after all,
has just given the Second Commandment against making graven images or
idols, such as the Baal whom Elijah mocks. Hardy associates Alec’s “viola-
tion” of Tess with a destruction of pastoral innocence, which he scarcely
sees as Baal-worship or idolatry. His emphasis is precisely that no mode of
religion, revealed or natural, could defend Tess from an overdetermined
system in which the only thing-in-itself is the rapacious Will to Live, a
Will that itself is, as it were, the curse of Yahweh upon the hungry gener-
ations.
Repetition in Tess is repetition as Schopenhauer saw it, which is little
different from how Hardy and Freud subsequently saw it. What is repeat-
ed, compulsively, is a unitary desire that is rapacious, indifferent, and uni-
versal. The pleasures of repetition in Hardy’s Tess are not interpretive and
perspectival, and so engendered by difference, but are actually masochis-
tic, in the erotogenic sense, and so ensue from the necessity of similarity.
Hardy’s pragmatic version of the aesthetic vision in this novel is essential-
ly sado-masochistic, and the sufferings of poor Tess give an equivocal
pleasure of repetition to the reader. The book’s extraordinary popularity
partly results from its exquisitely subtle and deeply sympathetic unfolding
of the torments of Tess, a pure woman because a pure nature, and doomed
to suffer merely because she is so much a natural woman. The poet Lionel
Johnson, whose early book (1895) on Hardy still seems to me unsurpassed,
brought to the reading of Tess a spirit that was antithetically both Shelleyan
and Roman Catholic:

as a girl of generous thought and sentiment, rich in beauty, rich in


the natural joys of life, she is brought into collision with the harsh-
ness of life.... The world was very strong; her conscience was
blinded and bewildered; she did some things nobly, and some
despairingly: but there is nothing, not even in studies of criminal
anthropology or of morbid pathology, to suggest that she was
wholly an irresponsible victim of her own temperament, and of
adverse circumstances.... She went through fire and water, and
made no true use of them: she is pitiable, but not admirable.

Johnson is very clear-sighted, but perhaps too much the Catholic


moralist. To the common reader, Tess is both pitiable and admirable, as
Hardy wanted her to be. Is it admirable, though, that, by identifying with
her, the reader takes a masochistic pleasure in her suffering? Aesthetically,
I would reply yes, but the question remains a disturbing one. When the
188 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

black flag goes slowly up the staff and we know that the beautiful Tess has
been executed, do we reside in Hardy’s final ironies, or do we experience a
pleasure of repetition that leaves us void of interpretive zeal, yet replete
with the gratification of a drive beyond the pleasure principle?

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy lived to be eighty-seven and a half years old, and his long
life (1840–1928) comprised two separate literary careers, as a late
Victorian novelist (1871–1897), and as a poet who defies temporal place-
ment (1898–1928). The critical reaction to his final novels, The Well-
Beloved and Jude the Obscure, ostensibly motivated Hardy’s abandonment
of prose fiction, but he always had thought of himself as a poet, and by
1897 was financially secure enough to center himself upon his poetry. He
is—with Housman, Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, and Geoffrey
Hill—one of the half-dozen or so major poets of the British Isles in the
century just past. But this little volume concerns itself with several of his
best novels, where again he can be judged to be one of the crucial novel-
ists of the final three decades of the nineteenth century, the bridge con-
necting George Eliot and the Brontës to Lawrence’s novels in the earlier
twentieth-century.
T.S. Eliot, who continues to enjoy a high critical reputation despite
being almost always wrong, attacked Hardy in a dreadful polemic, After
Strange Gods, where the novelist-poet is stigmatized as not believing in
Original Sin, which turns out to be an aesthetic criterion, since Hardy’s
style “touches sublimity without ever having passed through the stage of
being good.” This inaccurate wisecrack is prompted by Eliot’s severe sum-
mary of the post-Protestant Hardy: “A powerful personality uncurbed by
any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs;
unhampered by any ideas.” Eliot’s institutional attachment was to the
Anglo-Catholic Church: his “objective beliefs” were Christianity, royal-
ism, and what he called “classicism” and his “ideas” excluded Freud and
Marx.
Hardy, as High Romantic as Shelley and the Brontës, or as Lawrence
and Yeats, cannot be judged by Neo-Christian ideology. The best books
upon him remain, in my judgment, Lionel Johnson’s early The Art of
Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence’s outrageous A Study of Thomas
Hardy—which is mostly about Hardy’s impact on Lawrence. Michael
Millgate’s remains the best biography, but since Hardy burned letters and
concealed relationships, we still do not know enough to fully integrate the
work and the life. Both of Hardy’s marriages evidently did not fulfill him,
Novelists and Novels 189

and his lifelong attraction to women much younger than himself has an
Ibsenite and Yeatsian aura to it. There is a dark intensity, in the novels and
poems alike, that has marked sado-masochistic overtones.
Hardy’s personal greatness as a novelist is enhanced (and enabled) by
his freedom from T.S. Eliot’s attachments and submissions. The agnostic
Hardy was Schopenhauerian before he read Schopenhauer, and found a
name for the Will to Live that destroys the protagonists of his novels.
Hardy’s women and men are driven by the tragic forces that are incarnat-
ed in Sophocles’s Electra, Shakespeare’s Lear and Macbeth, and Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina. Henry James, who regarded Hardy as a poor imitator of
George Eliot, was as mistaken as T.S. Eliot was after him. D.H. Lawrence,
in his Study of Thomas Hardy, was much more accurate:

And this is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers,
Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small
action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed
nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and
formulated by the human consciousness. The difference is, that
whereas in Shakespeare or Sophocles the greater, uncompre-
hended morality, or fate, is actively transgressed, and holds, and
punishes the protagonist, whilst the greater morality is only pas-
sively, negatively transgressed, it is represented merely as being
present in background, in scenery, not taking any active part, hav-
ing no direct connexion with the protagonist. Oedipus, Hamlet,
Macbeth set themselves up against, or find themselves set up
against, the unfathomed moral forces of nature, and out of this
unfathomed force comes their death. Whereas Anna Karenina,
Eustacia, Tess, Sue, and Jude find themselves up against the
established system of human government and morality, they can-
not detach themselves, and are brought down. Their real tragedy
is that they are unfaithful to the greater unwritten morality,
which would have bidden Anna Karenina be patient and wait
until she, by virtue of greater right, could take what she needed
from society; would have bidden Vronsky detach himself from
the system, become an individual, creating a new colony of
morality with Anna; would have bidden Eustacia fight Clym for
his own soul, and Tess take and claim her Angel, since she had the
greater light; would have bidden Jude and Sue endure for very
honour’s sake, since one must bide by the best that one has
known, and not succumb to the lesser good.
190 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

What matters most, in Hardy’s women and men, is their tragic digni-
ty, though their author denies them the ultimate freedom of choice.
Hardy’s chief limitation, as a novelist, is his sense that the will is over-
determined, as it is in Schopenhauer. What saves Hardy’s novels is that
pragmatically he cannot maintain the detachment he seeks in regard to his
central personages. I recall, at fifteen, first reading The Return of the Native,
and falling-in-love with a second Hardy heroine, thus becoming unfaithful
to my love, Marty South in The Woodlanders. Hardy himself was ambiva-
lent towards Eustacia Vye, and yet he invokes her as a goddess, Queen of
Night, in a rhapsody not less than astonishing:

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she


would have done well with a little preparation. She had the pas-
sions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those
which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for
the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had
she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free
will, few in the world would have noticed the change of govern-
ment. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same
heaping up of favours here, of contumely there, the same gen-
erosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same cap-
tious alternation of caresses and blows that we endure now.
She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without
ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To
see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain dark-
ness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like
nightfall extinguishing the western glow.
Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could
always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was
brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the
Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Egdon banks, any of its
thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft
of the large Ulex Europoeus—which will act as a sort of hairbrush—
she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time.
She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light,
as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by
their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much
fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to
indulge in reverie without seeming to do so: she might have been
believed capable of sleeping without closing them up. Assuming
that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could
Novelists and Novels 191

fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like. The sparks from


it that rose into her dark pupils gave the same impression.

The Return of the Native was published in 1878, five years after Pater’s
Renaissance, and Walter Pater’s visions of Botticelli’s Venus and of
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa clearly influence Hardy’s description of his mag-
netic Eustacia, another fatal woman of the High Decadence, portrayed
with a sado-masochistic flavoring. Hardy, perhaps involuntarily, alludes to
a memorable sentence of the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance:

This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concur-
rence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting soon-
er or later on their ways.

A heroine with a flame-like soul is bound to destroy herself, and


Hardy’s ambivalence seems to me purely defensive. Hardy rather liked the
inscrutable Pater when they met, and their affinities—aside from tempera-
ment—were considerable. We do not ordinarily think of Hardy’s Wessex
as an aesthetic realm, but what else is it? Pater’s conception of tragedy is
close to Hardy’s: both indirectly descend from Hegel’s idea that the genre
must feature a conflict between right and right. But Hegel was not an
impressionist, and both Pater and Hardy tend to be, as is their common
descendent Virginia Woolf.
Yeats, very much in Pater’s tradition, said that: “We begin to live when
we conceive of life as tragedy.” Hardy would not have remarked that, but
he believed it, and exemplifies it in his novels. The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure are novelistic tragedies, closer
to Shakespeare than to George Eliot. Tess in particular has something of
the universal appeal of Shakespearean tragedy, though the sado-masochis-
tic gratification of the audience/readership is again an equivocal element in
Hardy’s aesthetic power. And yet who would have it otherwise? Tess is the
most beautiful of Hardy’s pastoral visions, and the tragic Tess is the most
disturbing of all his heroines, because the most desirable.
N O V E L S
A N D

Henry James
N O V E L I S T S

(1843–1916)

I
THE INTENSE CRITICAL ADMIRERS OF HENRY JAMES GO SO FAR AS TO CALL
him the major American writer, or even the most accomplished novelist in
the English language. The first assertion neglects only Walt Whitman,
while the second partly evades the marvelous sequence that moves from
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa through Jane Austen on to George Eliot, and
the alternative tradition that goes from Fielding through Dickens to Joyce.
James is certainly the crucial American novelist, and in his best works the
true peer of Austen and George Eliot. His precursor, Hawthorne, is more
than fulfilled in the splendors of The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the
Dove, giant descendants of The Marble Faun, while the rival American nov-
elists—Melville, Mark Twain, Dreiser, Faulkner—survive comparison with
James only by being so totally unlike him. Unlikeness makes Faulkner—
particularly in his great phase—a true if momentary rival, and perhaps if
you are to find a non-Jamesian sense of sustained power in the American
novel, you need to seek out our curious antithetical tradition that moves
between Moby-Dick and its darker descendants: As I Lay Dying, Miss
Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49. The normative consciousness of our
prose fiction, first prophesied by The Scarlet Letter, was forged by Henry
James, whose spirit lingers not only in palpable disciples like Edith
Wharton in The Age of Innocence and Willa Cather in her superb A Lost
Lady, but more subtly (because merged with Joseph Conrad’s aura) in nov-
elists as various as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Warren. It seems clear that
the relation of James to American prose fiction is precisely analogous to
Whitman’s relation to our poetry; each is, in his own sphere, what Emerson
prophesied as the Central Man who would come and change all things for-
ever, in a celebration of the American Newness.

192
Novelists and Novels 193

The irony of James’s central position among our novelists is palpable,


since, like the much smaller figure of T.S. Eliot later on, James abandoned
his nation and eventually became a British subject, after having been born
a citizen in Emerson’s America. But it is a useful commonplace of criticism
that James remained the most American of novelists, not less peculiarly
nationalistic in The Ambassadors than he had been in “Daisy Miller” and
The American. James, a subtle if at times perverse literary critic, understood
very well what we continue to learn and relearn; an American writer can
be Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but even a negative stance towards
Emerson always leads back again to his formulation of the post-Christian
American religion of Self-Reliance. Overt Emersonians like Thoreau,
Whitman, and Frost are no more pervaded by the Sage of Concord than
are anti-Emersonians like Hawthorne, Melville, and Eliot. Perhaps the
most haunted are those writers who evade Emerson, yet never leave his
dialectical ambiance, a group that includes Emily Dickinson, Henry James,
and Wallace Stevens.
Emerson was for Henry James something of a family tradition, though
that in itself hardly accounts for the plain failure of very nearly everything
that the novelist wrote about the essayist. James invariably resorts to a tone
of ironic indulgence on the subject of Emerson, which is hardly appropri-
ate to the American prophet of Power, Fate, Illusion, and Wealth. I sug-
gest that James unknowingly mixed Emerson up with the sage’s good
friend Henry James Sr., whom we dismiss as a Swedenborgian, but who
might better be characterized as an American Gnostic speculator, in
Emerson’s mode, though closer in eminence to, say, Bronson Alcott than
to the author of The Conduct of Life.
The sane and sacred Emerson was a master of evasions, particularly
when disciples became too pressing, whether upon personal or spiritual
matters. The senior Henry James is remembered now for having fathered
Henry, William, and Alice, and also for his famous outburst against
Emerson, whom he admired on the other side of idolatry: “O you man
without a handle!” The junior Henry James, overtly celebrating Emerson,
nevertheless remarked: “It is hardly too much, or too little, to say of
Emerson’s writings in general that they were not composed at all.”
“Composed” is the crucial word there, and makes me remember a beauti-
ful moment in Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate”:

There would still remain the never-resting mind,


So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
194 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Emerson’s mind, never merely restless, indeed was never-resting, as


was the mind of every member of the James family. The writings of
Emerson, not composed at all, constantly come back to what had been so
long composed, to what his admirer Nietzsche called the primordial poem
of mankind, the fiction that we have knocked together and called our cos-
mos. James was far too subtle not to have known this. He chose not to
know it, because he needed a provincial Emerson even as he needed a
provincial Hawthorne, just as he needed a New England that never was:
simple, gentle, and isolated, even a little childlike.
The days when T.S. Eliot could wonder why Henry James had not
carved up R.W. Emerson seem safely past, but we ought to remember
Eliot’s odd complaint about James as critic: “Even in handling men whom
he could, one supposes, have carved joint from joint—Emerson or
Norton—his touch is uncertain; there is a desire to be generous, a politi-
cal motive, an admission (in dealing with American writers) that under the
circumstances this was the best possible, or that it has fine qualities.” Aside
from appearing to rank Emerson with Charles Eliot Norton (which is
comparable to ranking Freud with Bernard Berenson), this unamiable
judgment reduces Emerson, who was and is merely the mind of America,
to the stature of a figure who might, at most, warrant the condescension of
James (and of Eliot). The cultural polemic involved is obvious, and indeed
obsessive, in Eliot, but though pleasanter in James is really no more
acceptable:

Of the three periods into which his life divides itself, the first was
(as in the case of most men) that of movement, experiment and
selection—that of effort too and painful probation. Emerson had
his message, but he was a good while looking for his form—the
form which, as he himself would have said, he never completely
found and of which it was rather characteristic of him that his later
years (with their growing refusal to give him the word), wishing to
attack him in his most vulnerable point, where his tenure was least
complete, had in some degree the effect of despoiling him. It all
sounds rather bare and stern, Mr. Cabot’s account of his youth and
early manhood, and we get an impression of a terrible paucity of
alternatives. If he would be neither a farmer nor a trader he could
“teach school”; that was the main resource and a part of the gen-
eral educative process of the young New Englander who proposed
to devote himself to the things of the mind. There was an advan-
tage in the nudity, however, which was that, in Emerson’s case at
least, the things of the mind did get themselves admirably well
Novelists and Novels 195

considered. If it be his great distinction and his special sign that he


had a more vivid conception of the moral life than any one else, it
is probably not fanciful to say that he owed it in part to the limit-
ed way in which he saw our capacity for living illustrated. The
plain, God-fearing, practical society which surrounded him was
not fertile in variations: it had great intelligence and energy, but it
moved altogether in the straightforward direction. On three occa-
sions later—three journeys to Europe—he was introduced to a
more complicated world; but his spirit, his moral taste, as it were,
abode always within the undecorated walls of his youth. There he
could dwell with that ripe unconsciousness of evil which is one of
the most beautiful signs by which we know him. His early writings
are full of quaint animadversion upon the vices of the place and
time, but there is something charmingly vague, light and general
in the arraignment. Almost the worst he can say is that these vices
are negative and that his fellow-townsmen are not heroic. We feel
that his first impressions were gathered in a community from
which misery and extravagance, and either extreme, of any sort,
were equally absent. What the life of New England fifty years ago
offered to the observer was the common lot, in a kind of achro-
matic picture, without particular intensifications. It was from this
table of the usual, the merely typical joys and sorrows that he pro-
ceeded to generalise—a fact that accounts in some degree for a
certain inadequacy and thinness in his enumerations. But it helps
to account also for his direct, intimate vision of the soul itself—
not in its emotions, its contortions and perversions, but in its pas-
sive, exposed, yet healthy form. He knows the nature of man and
the long tradition of its dangers; but we feel that whereas he can
put his finger on the remedies, lying for the most part, as they do,
in the deep recesses of virtue, of the spirit, he has only a kind of
hearsay, uninformed acquaintance with the disorders. It would
require some ingenuity, the reader may say too much, to trace
closely this correspondence between his genius and the frugal,
dutiful, happy but decidedly lean Boston of the past, where there
was a great deal of will but very little fulcrum—like a ministry
without an opposition.
The genius itself it seems to me impossible to contest—I mean
the genius for seeing character as a real and supreme thing. Other
writers have arrived at a more complete expression: Wordsworth
and Goethe, for instance, give one a sense of having found their
form, whereas with Emerson we never lose the sense that he is still
196 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

seeking it. But no one has had so steady and constant, and above
all so natural, a vision of what we require and what we are capable
of in the way of aspiration and independence. With Emerson it is
ever the special capacity for moral experience—always that and
only that. We have the impression, somehow, that life had never
bribed him to look at anything but the soul; and indeed in the
world in which he grew up and lived the bribes and lures, the
beguilements and prizes, were few. He was in an admirable posi-
tion for showing, what he constantly endeavoured to show, that
the prize was within. Any one who in New England at that time
could do that was sure of success, of listeners and sympathy: most
of all, of course, when it was a question of doing it with such a
divine persuasiveness. Moreover, the way in which Emerson did it
added to the charm—by word of mouth, face to face, with a rare,
irresistible voice and a beautiful mild, modest authority. If Mr.
Arnold is struck with the limited degree in which he was a man of
letters I suppose it is because he is more struck with his having
been, as it were, a man of lectures. But the lecture surely was never
more purged of its grossness—the quality in it that suggests a
strong light and a big brush—than as it issued from Emerson’s
lips; so far from being a vulgarisation, it was simply the esoteric
made audible, and instead of treating the few as the many, after
the usual fashion of gentlemen on platforms, he treated the many
as the few. There was probably no other society at that time in
which he would have got so many persons to understand that; for
we think the better of his audience as we read him, and wonder
where else people would have had so much moral attention to
give. It is to be remembered however that during the winter of
1847–48, on the occasion of his second visit to England, he found
many listeners in London and in provincial cities. Mr. Cabot’s vol-
umes are full of evidence of the satisfactions he offered, the
delights and revelations he may be said to have promised, to a race
which had to seek its entertainment, its rewards and consolations,
almost exclusively in the moral world. But his own writings are
fuller still; we find an instance almost wherever we open them.

It is astonishing to me that James judged Emerson’s “great distinction”


and “special sign” to be “that he had a more vivid conception of the moral
life than any one else,” unless “the moral life” has an altogether Jamesian
meaning. I would rather say that the great distinction and special sign of
James’s fiction is that it represents a more vivid conception of the moral life
Novelists and Novels 197

than even Jane Austen or George Eliot could convey to us. Emerson is not
much more concerned with morals than he is with manners; his subjects
are power, freedom, and fate. As for “that ripe unconsciousness of evil”
that James found in Emerson, I have not been able to find it myself, after
reading Emerson almost daily for the last twenty years, and I am remind-
ed of Yeats’s late essay on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in which Yeats
declares that his skeptical and passionate precursor, great poet that he cer-
tainly was, necessarily lacked the Vision of Evil. The necessity in both
strong misreadings, James’s and Yeats’s, was to clear more space for them-
selves.
Jealous as I am for Emerson, I can recognize that no critic has matched
James in seeing and saying what Emerson’s strongest virtue is: “But no one
has had so steady and constant, and above all so natural, a vision of what
we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and inde-
pendence.” No one, that is, except Henry James, for that surely is the quest
of Isabel Archer towards her own quite Emersonian vision of aspiration
and independence. “The moral world” is James’s phrase and James’s
emphasis. Emerson’s own emphasis, I suspect, was considerably more
pragmatic than that of James. When James returned to America in 1904 on
a visit, after twenty years of self-exile, he went back to Concord and
recorded his impressions in The American Scene:

It is odd, and it is also exquisite, that these witnessing ways should


be the last ground on which we feel moved to ponderation of the
“Concord school”—to use, I admit, a futile expression; or rather,
I should doubtless say, it would be odd if there were not inevitably
something absolute in the fact of Emerson’s all but lifelong con-
nection with them. We may smile a little as we “drag in” Weimar,
but I confess myself, for my part, much more satisfied than not by
our happy equivalent, “in American money,” for Goethe and
Schiller. The money is a potful in the second case as in the first,
and if Goethe, in the one, represents the gold and Schiller the sil-
ver, I find (and quite putting aside any bimetallic prejudice) the
same good relation in the other between Emerson and Thoreau. I
open Emerson for the same benefit for which I open Goethe, the
sense of moving in large intellectual space, and that of the gush,
here and there, out of the rock, of the crystalline cupful, in wis-
dom and poetry, in Wahrheit and Dichtung; and whatever I open
Thoreau for (I needn’t take space here for the good reasons) I
open him oftener than I open Schiller. Which comes back to our
feeling that the rarity of Emerson’s genius, which has made him
198 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

so, for the attentive peoples, the first, and the one really rare,
American spirit in letters, couldn’t have spent his career in a
charming woody, watery place, for so long socially and typically
and, above all, interestingly homogeneous, without an effect as of
the communication to it of something ineffaceable. It was during
his long span his immediate concrete, sufficient world; it gave him
his nearest vision of life, and he drew half his images, we recog-
nize, from the revolution of its seasons and the play of its man-
ners. I don’t speak of the other half, which he drew from else-
where. It is admirably, to-day, as if we were still seeing these things
in those images, which stir the air like birds, dim in the eventide,
coming home to nest. If one had reached a “time of life” one had
thereby at least heard him lecture; and not a russet leaf fell for me,
while I was there, but fell with an Emersonian drop.

That is a beautiful study of the nostalgias and tells us, contra T.S. Eliot,
what James’s relation to Emerson actually was. We know how much that is
essential in William James was quarried out of Emerson, particularly from
the essay “Experience,” which gave birth to Pragmatism. Henry James was
not less indebted to Emerson than William James was. The Portrait of a
Lady is hardly an Emersonian novel; perhaps The Scarlet Letter actually is
closer to that. Yet Isabel Archer is Emerson’s daughter, just as Lambert
Strether is Emerson’s heir. The Emersonian aura also lingers on even in
the ghostly tales of Henry James.

The Ambassadors

James thought The Ambassadors was the best of all his novels. I myself pre-
fer not only The Portrait of A Lady and The Wings of the Dove, but even The
Bostonians, upon the simple test of rereading. All of the novelistic virtues
that critics have found in The Ambassadors are certainly there, but they are
rather too overtly there. The novel is a beautiful pattern and a model of
artistic control, but is Strether of the company of Isabel Archer and Milly
Theale? He is intended to be, in the best sense, James’s Portrait of a
Gentleman. Every good reader admires him and finds him sympathetic, yet
across the years he comes to seem less and less memorable. I suspect that
is because he does not give us enough grief; his story is not painful to us,
whereas Isabel’s is. Isabel, Emersonian and Paterian, nevertheless has in
her the force of the Protestant will in its earlier intensity, almost the force
of Dorothea Brooke, though not of their common ancestress, Clarissa
Harlowe. But Lewis Lambert Strether is denied any field in which the will
Novelists and Novels 199

might be exercised heroically, since James will not even let him fall in love,
except perhaps with the rather too symbolic or idealized Madame de
Vionnet.
Everything in the art of Henry James is sublimely deliberate, which
means that the imbalance between the matter and the manner of The
Ambassadors is James’s peculiar mode of taking those ultimate risks that
alone allow him to make distinctions and achieve distinction. Strether’s
mission is to rescue Chad from Madame de Vionnet, but is Chad worth
rescuing? The best thing about Chad is that he becomes Horatio to
Strether’s Hamlet, and so serves as the reader’s surrogate for appreciating
Strether. However, Horatio floats about the court of Elsinore as a kind of
privileged outsider, and his splendid destiny is to survive as the teller of
Hamlet’s story. Chad will go back to Woollett and enthusiastically pioneer
in the art of advertising so as to raise the Newsome domestic device to
undreamed-of heights of use and profit. The irony of irony is all very well
in high romance or in High Romanticism, but not even the comic sense of
Henry James quite saves The Ambassadors from a certain readerly listless-
ness that follows Strether’s terminal “Then there we are!” to the endlessly
receptive Maria Gostrey.
James is perfectly ruthless in his application of what has come to be the
Formalist principle that subject matter in literary art is precisely what does
not matter. The Iliad after all, from any ironic perspective, like that of
Shakespeare’s more than mordant Troilus and Cressida, has as its matter the
quarrels between brawny and vainglorious chieftains over the possession of
the whore Helen, or of this or that despoiled captive woman. That is not
Homer’s Iliad, nor is The Ambassadors the story of the education of Lambert
Strether, until at last he can warn little Bilham (one wearies of the “little”!)
that life’s meaning is that we must live. Seeing is living, for Strether, as for
James, as for Carlyle, for Ruskin, for Emerson, for Pater.
“Impressionism,” as a literary term, is not very useful, since even Pater
is not an Impressionist in a painterly sense. What Strether sees is simply
what is there, and what is there would appear to be loss, very much in
Pater’s sense of loss. James’s aesthetic has its differences from Pater’s, but I
am not so certain that Strether’s vision and Pater’s are easily to be distin-
guished from one another. When Strether experiences his crisis (or
epiphany) in Gloriani’s garden, we are in the cosmos of Pater and of
Nietzsche, in which life can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Strether has just met Madame de Vionnet for the first time: “She was
dressed in black, but in black that struck him as light and transparent; she
was exceedingly fair, and, though she was as markedly slim, her face had a
roundness, with eyes far apart and a little strange.” Perhaps that is love at
200 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

first sight, and certainly Madame de Vionnet is herself the epiphany. “In
black that struck him as light and transparent” would have alerted any
Emersonian or Paterian, and this is the prelude to the central paragraph of
The Ambassadors, Strether’s famous address to little Bilham:

“It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t strike me as
in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in gen-
eral pretty well trusted, of course—with the clock of their freedom
ticking as loud as it seems to do here—to keep an eye on the fleet-
ing hour. All the same don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly
young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you
can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do
in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that
what have you had? This place and these impressions—mild as
you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of
Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place—well, have had their
abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I
see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too
old at any rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least; and more than
you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train
had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the
gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding
whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses;
make no mistake about that. The affair—I mean the affair of life—
couldn’t, no doubt, have been different for me; for it’s at the best
a tin mould, either fluted and embossed, with ornamental excres-
cences, or else smooth and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless
jelly, one’s consciousness is poured—so that one ‘takes’ the form,
as the great cook says, and is more or less compactly held by it:
one lives in fine as one can. Still, one has the illusion of freedom;
therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I
was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have
it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of
reaction against the mistake; and the voice of reaction should, no
doubt, always be taken with an allowance. But that doesn’t affect
the point that the right time is now yours. The right time is any
time that one is still so lucky as to have. You’ve plenty; that’s the
great thing; you’re, as I say, damn you, so happily and hatefully
young. Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. Of course I
don’t take you for a fool, or I shouldn’t be addressing you thus
awfully. Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake.
Novelists and Novels 201

For it was a mistake. Live!” ... Slowly and sociably, with full paus-
es and straight dashes, Strether had so delivered himself; holding
little Bilham from step to step deeply and gravely attentive. The
end of all was that the young man had turned quite solemn, and
that this was a contradiction of the innocent gaiety the speaker
had wished to promote. He watched for a moment the conse-
quence of his words, and then, laying a hand on his listener’s knee
and as if to end with the proper joke: “And now for the eye I shall
keep on you!”

The loud ticking of the clock of freedom is Strether’s version of Pater’s


“We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more,” itself a
Paterian commentary upon Victor Hugo’s “We are all condemned men,
with a kind of indefinite reprieve.” Pater’s question is how are we to spend
that interval, and his answer is in perception and sensation as memorial-
ized by art. Strether is not a questioner because Pater is a theoretician of
seeing, but Strether does see, indeed always has seen, but was too morally
intelligent to have had the illusion of freedom at the right time. And yet:
“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.” James calls
Strether elderly, at fifty-five, but even in 1903 that was not necessarily eld-
erly. Strether, like Pater’s Mona Lisa, is older than the rocks among which
he sits, or he is like Nietzsche’s Emerson: “He does not know how old he
is already, or how young he is still going to be.” James’s way of expressing
that Nietzschean paradox has less wit but more American pragmatism.
Strether, like Emerson, is a man of imagination who achieves “an amount
of experience out of any proportion to his adventures.” There truly is no
past for Strether; he is an intuitive Emersonian who knows that there is no
history, only biography. Strether has seen in Madame de Vionnet what
Pater saw in Leonardo’s Lady Lisa (I owe this insight to F.O. Matthiessen):
a goddess, a nymph, a woman-of-women, infinitely nuanced, endlessly var-
ied.
But if Strether has fallen in love with his vision, his love is like the love
of Pater or of Henry James himself, a wholly aesthetic phenomenon. We
do not expect to see Strether replace Chad as the lady’s lover any more
than we could expect him to settle down with the accommodating Maria
Gostrey, let alone attempt to marry Mrs. Newsome upon his return to
Woollett. The sad truth is that none of these ladies, not even the superbly
unreal Madame de Vionnet, would be adequate to Lewis Lambert
Strether, anymore than Touchett, Warburton, Goodwood would be ade-
quate to Isabel Archer. Strether at least does not suffer a female version
of Osmond, but then Strether is hardly the heir of all the ages. He is the
202 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

surrogate for Henry James, novelist, who inevitably preferred his own
spiritual self-portrait to all his other novels.

The Portrait of a Lady

Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter permanently usurped the


role of the American Eve. Henry James, in his little book on Hawthorne,
allowed himself to be both condescending and evasive towards his authen-
tic American predecessor, a pattern he repeated in writing about George
Eliot. Both were too close for comfort, so much so that I risk that cliché
with high deliberation. James’s deprecation of The Scarlet Letter is notori-
ous, and has not prevented several critics from noting the parallel between
Hester’s ultimate return to Boston, and Isabel’s decision to go back to
Osmond, her horrible choice of a husband.
Hester and Isabel are fascinating to compare, because they remain the
major representations of an American woman anywhere in our imaginative
literature, and yet their divergences ultimately transcend their resem-
blances. Hester necessarily is the grander figure, because she is the more
audacious and heroic, but also her situation is more extreme and dramatic.
By refusing to identify Dimmesdale as her partner in “sin,” she defies
Puritan Boston and its theocracy. More important, she never yields to
them inwardly, and her self-affirmation is majestic. Aesthetically, she has
other advantages over Isabel Archer. Though Isabel is beautiful, and
inspires love, she experiences it only in a sisterly mode for Ralph Touchett
and as a foster-mother for Pansy, Osmond’s daughter by Madame Merle.
Inadequate as Dimmesdale be, he has aroused a superb passion in Hester,
whose every appearance in the novel radiates sexual power, whereas Isabel
flees from Goodwood’s fierce desire. And the wretched Osmond—hyp-
ocrite, pseudo-aesthete, fortune-hunter—dwindles away next to Hester’s
husband, the Satanic Chillingworth. If you add Hester’s indubitable status
as an artist in her embroidery, contrasted to Isabel’s lack of all vocation or
occupation, then Hawthorne’s Eve far outshines James’s.
And yet Isabel Archer more than sustains a comparison with her fore-
runner. Hawthorne, like many readers, is in love with Hester: one might
even speak of his desiring her, since he has created her as the image of
desire. But Hawthorne maintains a distance from her, whereas James could
have said (though he would not) of his heroine what Flaubert had said of
Emma Bovary: “I am Isabel Archer.” Flaubert lovingly murders Emma,
even as Tolstoy amorously murdered his Anna Karenina. James, preserving
Isabel as he would himself, merely ruins her life, which is not his judgment,
and which Isabel herself reversed as a possible judgment. She goes back to
Novelists and Novels 203

Osmond in order to proclaim her self-reliance, indeed to establish a con-


tinuity in her self-identity. It intrigues me that I do not resist Hester’s
return to Boston and her scarlet letter, whereas I both aesthetically
approve yet humanly resent and am saddened by Isabel’s return to
Osmond. James has implied clearly enough that, by mutual consent, sexu-
al relations have long since ceased for Osmond and Isabel, so that one does
not regard Isabel as a sexual sacrifice. Nor does one regard either
Goodwood or Warburton as worthy of Isabel: James has provided no alter-
native to Osmond, Ralph Touchett being frail and soon to die. The great
enigma remains: however well we understand the aesthetic and spiritual
inevitability of Isabel’s decision, how can we accept it emotionally? Her
initial choice of Osmond is appalling enough; her return violates our sense
of fairness and increases our distance from her, despite our intense caring.
The Scarlet Letter is a romance, a genre it shares with Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe. The Portrait of a Lady is a Balzacian novel, in which Osmond and
Madame Merle are motivated by financial considerations, which would be
absurd in the realm of Hester, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Freedom
in a novel is very different from independence in a romance. Both Hester
and Isabel are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughters, as it were, but Isabel is
by far the more socialized figure. James certainly would have argued that
Isabel, particularly at the book’s conclusion, represents a significant
advance in consciousness over Hester. Isabel has to be more advanced in
worldly sophistication, but one wonders if her emphasis upon her own
identity, and her insistence upon accepting the contract with life she has
made, is not achieved at the cost of otherness, since the wretched Osmond
scarcely is her concern, and Ralph Touchett is dead. Hester, befriending
outcast women and brooding deeply upon the nature of human love, is at
least as rich a consciousness.
Perhaps Isabel is closer to us not just because of history, but because
Hester has a tragic grandeur. Isabel is vastly superior to most of us, in fine-
ness of sensibility and of aspiration, and yet she is one of us, poor in judg-
ment and unlucky where she had seemed luckiest. That may be why The
Portrait of a Lady seems more relevant each passing day, in a society where
American women of education and beauty are more free than ever before
to choose, and to fall.
N O V E L S
A N D

Kate Chopin
N O V E L I S T S

(1851–1904)

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF KATE CHOPIN (1969) COMPRISE ONLY TWO VOLUMES.
In her own lifetime (1851–1904), she published two novels, At Fault (1890),
which I have not read, and the now celebrated The Awakening (1899), as well
as two volumes of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie
(1897). The short stories—out of Maupassant—are very mixed in quality, but
even the best are fairly slight. The Awakening, a flawed but strong novel, now
enjoys an eminent status among feminist critics, but I believe that many of
them weakly misread the book, which is anything but feminist in its stance.
It is a Whitmanian book, profoundly so, not only in its echoes of his poetry,
which are manifold, but more crucially in its erotic perspective, which is nar-
cissistic and even autoerotic, very much in Whitman’s true mode. The sexu-
al awakening that centers the novel involves a narcissistic self-investment that
constitutes a new ego for the heroine. Unfortunately, she fails to see that her
passion is for herself, and this error perhaps destroys her.
Lest I seem ironic, here at the start, I protest that irony is hardly my
trope; that Walt Whitman, in my judgment, remains the greatest American
writer; and that I continue to admire The Awakening, though a bit less at the
second reading than at the first. Its faults are mostly in its diction; Chopin
had no mastery of style. As narrative, it is simplistic rather than simple, and
its characters have nothing memorable about them. Chopin’s exuberance as
a writer was expended where we would expect a daughter of Whitman to
locate her concern: the ecstatic rebirth of the self. Since Chopin was not
writing either American epic or American elegy, but rather an everyday
domestic novel, more naturalistic than Romantic, fissures were bound to
appear in her work. The form of Flaubert does not accommodate what

204
Novelists and Novels 205

Emerson—who may be called Chopin’s literary grandfather—named as


the great and crescive self. Nevertheless, as a belated American
Transcendentalist, Chopin risked the experiment, and what Emerson
called the Newness breaks the vessels of Chopin’s chosen form. I would
call this the novel’s largest strength, though it is also its formal weakness.

The Awakening

Walt Whitman the man doubtless lusted after what he termed the love of
comrades, but Walt Whitman the poet persuades us rhetorically only when
he lusts after himself. To state this more precisely, Walt Whitman, one of
the roughs, an American, the self of Song of Myself, lusts after “the real me”
or “me myself ” of Walt Whitman. Chopin’s heroine, Edna, becomes, as it
were, one of the roughs, an American, when she allows herself to lust after
her real me, her me myself. That is why Chopin’s The Awakening gave
offense to reviewers in 1899, precisely as Leaves of Grass gave offense from
its first appearance in 1855, onwards to Whitman’s death, and would still
give offense, if we read it as the Pindaric celebration of masturbation that
it truly constitutes. Edna, like Walt, falls in love with her own body, and
her infatuation with the inadequate Robert is merely a screen for her over-
whelming obsession, which is to nurse and mother herself. Chopin, on
some level, must have known how sublimely outrageous she was being, but
the level was not overt, and part of her novel’s power is in its negation of
its own deepest knowledge. Her reviewers were not stupid, and it is shal-
low to condemn them, as some feminist critics now tend to do. Here is the
crucial paragraph in a review by one Frances Porcher (in The Mirror 9,
May 4, 1899), who senses obscurely but accurately that Edna’s desire is for
herself:

It is not a pleasant picture of soul-dissection, take it anyway you


like; and so, though she finally kills herself, or rather lets herself
drown to death, one feels that it is not in the desperation born of
an over-burdened heart, torn by complicating duties but rather
because she realizes that something is due to her children, that she
cannot get away from, and she is too weak to face the issue.
Besides which, and this is the stronger feeling, she has offered her-
self wholly to the man, who loves her too well to take her at her
word; “she realizes that the day would come when he, too, and the
thought of him, would melt out of her existence,” she has awak-
ened to know the shifting, treacherous, fickle deeps of her own
soul in which lies, alert and strong and cruel, the fiend called
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Passion that is all animal and all of the earth, earthy. It is better to
lie down in green waves and sink down in close embraces of old
ocean, and so she does.

The metaphor of “shifting, treacherous, fickle deeps” here, however


unoriginal, clearly pertains more to Edna’s body than to her soul, and what
is most “alert and strong and cruel” in Edna is manifestly a passion for her-
self. The love-death that Edna dies has its Wagnerian element, but again
is more Whitmanian, suggesting the song of death sung by the hermit
thrush or solitary singer in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Edna moves in the heavy, sensual and sensuous atmosphere of Whitman’s
“The Sleepers,” and she dies only perhaps as Whitman’s real me or me
myself dies, awash in a body indistinguishable from her own, the body of
the mother, death, the ocean, and the night of a narcissistic dream of love
that perfectly restitutes the self for all its losses, that heals fully the origi-
nal, narcissistic scar.
Sandra M. Gilbert, who seems to me our most accomplished feminist
critic, reads the novel as a female revision of the male aesthetic reveries of
Aphrodite’s rebirth. I would revise Gilbert only by suggesting that the
major instances of such reverie—in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne,
Pater, and Wilde—are not less female than Chopin’s vision is, and para-
doxically are more feminist than her version of the myth. The autoerotic
seems to be a realm where, metaphorically anyway, there are no major dif-
ferences between male and female seers, so that Chopin’s representation of
Edna’s psychic self-gratification is not essentially altered from Whitman’s
solitary bliss:

Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes,
removing the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck
and arms in the basin that stood between the windows. She took
off her shoes and stockings and stretched herself in the very cen-
ter of the high, white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a
strange, quaint bed, with its sweet country odor of laurel linger-
ing about the sheets and mattress! She stretched her strong limbs
that ached a little. She ran her fingers through her loosened hair
for a while. She looked at her round arms as she held them
straight up and rubbed them one after the other, observing close-
ly, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm
quality and texture of her flesh. She clasped her hands easily above
her head, and it was thus she fell asleep.
Novelists and Novels 207

Edna observing, as a discovery, “the fine, firm quality and texture of


her flesh,” is the heir of Whitman proclaiming: “If I worship one thing
more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it.”
Chopin seems to have understood, better than most readers in 1899, what
Whitman meant by his crucial image of the tally: “My knowledge my live
parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things.” As the erotic image
of the poet’s voice, the tally obeys Emerson’s dark law of Compensation:
“Nothing is got for nothing.” If Edna awakens to her own passion for her
own body and its erotic potential, then she must come also to the tally’s
measurement of her own death.

II

Some aspects of Whitman’s influence upon The Awakening have been


traced by Lewis Leary and others, but since the influence is not always
overt but frequently repressed, there is more to be noticed about it. Edna
first responds to “the everlasting voice of the sea” in chapter 4, where its
maternal contrast to her husband’s not unkind inadequacy causes her to
weep copiously. At the close of chapter 6, the voice of the Whitmanian
ocean is directly associated with Edna’s awakening to self:

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clam-


oring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in
abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contempla-
tion.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is
sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

This is a palpable and overt influence; far subtler, because repressed, is


the Whitmanian aura with which Kate Chopin associates the ambivalence
of motherhood. Whitman himself both fathered and mothered all of his
mostly tormented siblings, as soon as he was able, but his own ambiva-
lences toward both fatherhood and motherhood inform much of his best
poetry. Something of the ambiguous strength of The Awakening’s conclu-
sion hovers in its repressed relation to Whitman. Edna leaves Robert, after
their mutual declaration of love, in order to attend her close friend Adèle
in her labor pains:

Edna began to feel uneasy. She was seized with a vague dread. Her
own like experiences seemed far away, unreal, and only half remem-
bered. She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of
208 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awak-


ening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to
the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go.
She began to wish she had not come; her presence was not nec-
essary. She might have invented a pretext for staying away; she
might even invent a pretext now for going. But Edna did not go.
With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against
the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene [of] torture.
She was still stunned and speechless with emotion when later
she leaned over her friend to kiss her and softly say good-by.
Adèle, pressing her cheek, whispered in an exhausted voice:
“Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children!
Remember them!”

The protest against nature here is hardly equivocal, yet it has the pecu-
liar numbness of “the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and
go.” Schopenhauer’s influence joins Whitman’s as Chopin shows us Edna
awakening to the realization of lost individuality, of not wanting “anything
but my own way,” while knowing that the will to live insists always upon
its own way, at the individual’s expense:

Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and
had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she
desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her
except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come
when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her exis-
tence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like
antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and
sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days.
But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these
things when she walked down to the beach.
The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with
the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive,
never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the
soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach,
up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a bro-
ken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling
disabled down, down to the water.

The soul’s slavery, in Schopenhauer, is to be eluded through philo-


sophical contemplation of a very particular kind, but in Whitman only
Novelists and Novels 209

through a dangerous liaison with night, death, the mother, and the sea.
Chopin is closer again to Whitman, and the image of the disabled bird cir-
cling downward to darkness stations itself between Whitman and Wallace
Stevens, as it were, and constitutes another American approach to the
Emersonian abyss of the self. Edna, stripped naked, enters the mothering
sea with another recall of Whitman: “The foamy wavelets curled up to her
white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles.” In the hermit
thrush’s great song of death that is the apotheosis of “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d,” death arrives coiled and curled like a serpent,
undulating round the world. Whitman’s “dark mother always gliding near
with soft feet” has come to deliver Edna from the burden of being a moth-
er, and indeed from all burden of otherness, forever.
N O V E L S
A N D

Joseph Conrad
N O V E L I S T S

(1857–1924)

IN CONRAD’S “YOUTH” (1898), MARLOW GIVES US A BRILLIANT DESCRIPTION


of the sinking of the Judea:

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fierce-
ly upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams;
upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an
immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its
summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She
burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kin-
dled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars.
A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward
to that old ship at the end of her laborious day. The surrender of
her weary ghost to the keeper of the stars and sea was stirring like
the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before day-
break, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks
that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful,
the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a
charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a
glowing mass of coal within.
“Then the oars were got out, and the.boats forming in a line
moved around her remains as if in procession—the longboat lead-
ing. As we pulled across her stern a slim dart of fire shot out
viciously at us, and suddenly she went down, head first, in a great
hiss of steam. The unconsumed stern was the last to sink; but the
paint had gone, had cracked, had peeled off, and there were no let-
ters, there was no word, no stubborn device that was like her soul,
to flash at the rising sun her creed and her name.

210
Novelists and Novels 211

The apocalyptic vividness is enhanced by the visual namelessness of


the “unconsumed stern,” as though the creed of Christ’s people maintained
both its traditional refusal to violate the Second Commandment, and its
traditional affirmation of its not-to-be-named God. With the Judea,
Conrad sinks the romance of youth’s illusions, but like all losses in Conrad
this submersion in the destructive element is curiously dialectical, since
only experiential loss allows for the compensation of an imaginative gain
in the representation of artistic truth. Originally the ephebe of Flaubert
and of Flaubert’s “son,” Maupassant, Conrad was reborn as the narrative
disciple of Henry James, the James of The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie
Knew, rather than the James of the final phase.
Ian Watt convincingly traces the genesis of Marlow to the way that
“James developed the indirect narrative approach through the sensitive
central intelligence of one of the characters.” Marlow, whom James derid-
ed as “that preposterous magic mariner,” actually represents Conrad’s
swerve away from the excessive strength of James’s influence upon him. By
always “mixing himself up with the narrative,” in James’s words, Marlow
guarantees an enigmatic reserve that increases the distance between the
impressionistic techniques of Conrad and James. Though there is little
valid comparison that can be made between Conrad’s greatest achieve-
ments and the hesitant, barely fictional status of Pater’s Marius the
Epicurean, Conrad’s impressionism is as extreme and solipsistic as Pater’s.
There is a definite parallel between the fates of Sebastian Van Storck (in
Pater’s Imaginary Portraits) and Decoud in Nostromo.
In his 1897 “Preface” to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad famous-
ly insisted that his creative task was “before all to make you see.” He pre-
sumably was aware that he thus joined himself to a line of prose seers
whose latest representatives were Carlyle, Ruskin, and Pater. There is a
movement in that group from Carlyle’s exuberant “Natural
Supernaturalism” through Ruskin’s paganization of Evangelical fervor to
Pater’s evasive and skeptical Epicurean materialism, with its eloquent sug-
gestion that all we can see is the flux of sensations. Conrad exceeds Pater
in the reduction of impressionism to a state of consciousness where the
seeing narrator is hopelessly mixed up with the seen narrative. James may
seem an impressionist when compared to Flaubert, but alongside of
Conrad he is clearly shown to be a kind of Platonist, imposing forms and
resolutions upon the flux of human relations by an exquisite formal geom-
etry altogether his own.
To observe that Conrad is metaphysically less of an Idealist is hardly
to argue that he is necessarily a stronger novelist than his master, James. It
may suggest though that Conrad’s originality is more disturbing than that
of James, and may help explain why Conrad, rather than James, became
212 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the dominant influence upon the generation of American novelists that


included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The cosmos of The Sun
Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying derives from Heart of
Darkness and Nostromo rather than from The Ambassadors and The Golden
Bowl. Darl Bundren is the extreme inheritor of Conrad’s quest to carry
impressionism into its heart of darkness in the human awareness that we
are only a flux of sensations gazing outwards upon a flux of impressions.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness may always be a critical battleground between readers


who regard it as an aesthetic triumph, and those like myself who doubt its
ability to rescue us from its own hopeless obscurantism. That Marlow
seems, at moments, not to know what he is talking about, is almost cer-
tainly one of the narrative’s deliberate strengths, but if Conrad also seems
finally not to know, then he necessarily loses some of his authority as a sto-
ryteller. Perhaps he loses it to death our death, or our anxiety that he will
not sustain the illusion of his fiction’s duration long enough for us to sub-
limate the frustrations it brings us.
These frustrations need not be deprecated. Conrad’s diction, normal-
ly flawless, is notoriously vague throughout Heart of Darkness. E.M.
Forster’s wicked comment on Conrad’s entire work is justified perhaps
only when applied to Heart of Darkness:

Misty in the middle as well as at the edges, the secret cask of his
genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel.... No creed, in fact.

Forster’s misty vapor seems to inhabit such Conradian recurrent mod-


ifiers as “monstrous,” “unspeakable,” “atrocious,” and many more, but
these are minor defects compared to the involuntary self-parody that
Conrad inflicts upon himself. There are moments that sound more like
James Thurber lovingly satirizing Conrad than like Conrad:

“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot house: there was more air
there. Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter.
There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman
with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink
of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something, and all
that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulat-
ed, rapid, breathless utterance.
“ ‘ Do you understand this?’ I asked.
Novelists and Novels 213

“He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with
a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer,
but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his
colorless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively. ‘Do I
not?’ he said slowly, gasping, as if the words had been torn out of
him by a supernatural power.

This cannot be defended as an instance of what Frank Kermode calls


a language “needed when Marlow is not equal to the experience
described.” Has the experience been described here? Smiles of “indefin-
able meaning” are smiled once too often in a literary text if they are smiled
even once. Heart of Darkness has taken on some of the power of myth, even
if the book is limited by its involuntary obscurantism. It has haunted
American literature from T.S. Eliot’s poetry through our major novelists of
the era 1920 to 1940, on to a line of movies that go from the Citizen Kane
of Orson Welles (a substitute for an abandoned Welles project to film
Heart of Darkness ) on to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. In this instance,
Conrad’s formlessness seems to have worked as an aid, so diffusing his con-
ception as to have made it available to an almost universal audience.

Nostromo

An admirer of Conrad is happiest with his five great novels: Lord Jim
(1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1906), Under Western Eyes
(1910), and Victory (1914). Subtle and tormented narratives, they form an
extraordinarily varied achievement, and despite their common features
they can make a reader wonder that they all should have been composed
by the same artist. Endlessly enigmatic as a personality and as a formida-
ble moral character, Conrad pervades his own books, a presence not to be
put by, an elusive storyteller who yet seems to write a continuous spiritual
autobiography. By the general consent of advanced critics and of common
readers, Conrad’s masterwork is Nostromo, where his perspectives are
largest, and where his essential originality in the representation of human
blindnesses and consequent human affections is at its strongest. Like all
overwhelming originalities, Conrad’s ensues in an authentic difficulty,
which can be assimilated only very slowly, if at all. Repeated rereadings
gradually convince me that Nostromo is anything but a Conradian litany to
the virtue he liked to call “fidelity.” The book is tragedy, of a post-
Nietzschean sort, despite Conrad’s strong contempt for Nietzsche.
Decoud, void of all illusions, is self-destroyed because he cannot sustain
solitude. Nostromo, perhaps the only persuasive instance of the natural
214 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

sublime in a twentieth-century hero of fiction, dies “betrayed he hardly


knows by what or by whom,” as Conrad says. But this is Conrad at his most
knowing, and the novel shows us precisely how Nostromo is betrayed, by
himself, and by what in himself.
It is a mystery of an overwhelming fiction why it can sustain virtually
endless rereadings. Nostromo, to me, rewards frequent rereadings in some-
thing of the way that Othello does; there is always surprise waiting for me.
Brilliant as every aspect of the novel is, Nostromo himself is the imagina-
tive center of the book, and yet Nostromo is unique among Conrad’s per-
sonae, and not a Conradian man whom we could have expected. His cre-
ator’s description of this central figure as “the Magnificent Capataz, the
Man of the People,” breathes a writer’s love for his most surprising act of
the imagination. So does a crucial paragraph from the same source, the
“Author’s Note” that Conrad added as a preface thirteen years after the ini-
tial publication:

In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and


generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in
the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with
something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a
Man of the People, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to
lead but ruling from within. Years afterwards, grown older as the
famous Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about
his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the modernized
streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attending
the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at
the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agi-
tation, the trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowl-
edge of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essen-
tially a man of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life
and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of
dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of
the People, their undoubted Great Man—with a private history of
his own.

Despite this “moral ruin,” and not because of it, Conrad and his read-
ers share the conviction of Nostromo’s greatness, share in his sublime self-
recognition. How many persuasive images of greatness, of a natural sub-
limity, exist in modern fiction? Conrad’s may be the last enhanced vision
of Natural Man, of the Man of the People, in which anyone has found it
possible to believe. Yet Conrad himself characteristically qualifies his own
Novelists and Novels 215

belief in Nostromo, and critics too easily seduced by ironies have weakly
misread the only apparent irony of Conrad’s repeated references to
Nostromo as “the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores.” Magnificent,
beyond the reach of all irony, Nostromo manifestly is. It is the magnifi-
cence of the natural leader who disdains leadership, yet who loves reputa-
tion. Though he is of the People, Nostromo serves no ideal, unlike old
Viola the Garibaldino. With the natural genius for command, the charis-
matic endowment that could make him another Garibaldi, Nostromo nev-
ertheless scorns any such role, in the name of any cause whatsoever. He is
a pure Homeric throwback, not wholly unlike Tolstoi’s Hadji Murad,
except that he acknowledges neither enemies nor friends, except for his
displaced father, Viola. And he enchants us even as he enchants the popu-
lace of Sulaco, though most of all he enchants the skeptical and enigmatic
Conrad, who barely defends himself against the enchantment with some
merely rhetorical ironies.
Ethos is the daimon, character is fate, in Conrad as in Heracleitus, and
Nostromo’s tragic fate is the inevitable fulfillment of his desperate
grandeur, which Conrad cannot dismiss as mere vanity, despite all his own
skepticism. Only Nostromo saves the novel, and Conrad, from nihilism,
the nihilism of Decoud’s waste in suicide. Nostromo is betrayed partly by
Decoud’s act of self-destruction, with its use of four ingots of silver to send
his body down, but largely by his own refusal to maintain the careless pref-
erence for glory over gain which is more than a gesture or a style, which
indeed is the authentic mode of being that marks the hero. Nostromo is
only himself when he can say, with perfect truth: “My name is known from
one end of Sulaco to the other. What more can you do for me?”

II

Towards the end of Chapter Ten of Part Third, “The Lighthouse,”


Conrad renders his own supposed verdict upon both Decoud and
Nostromo, in a single page, in two parallel sentences a paragraph apart:

A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution


meted out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud,
weighted by the bars of San Tomé silver, disappeared without a trace,
swallowed up in the immense indifference of things.

The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, victim of the disenchanted


vanity which is the reward of audacious action, sat in the weary pose
of a hunted outcast through a night of sleeplessness as tormenting as
216 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

any known to Decoud, his companion in the most desperate affair


of his life. And he wondered how Decoud had died.

Decoud’s last thought, after shooting himself was: “I wonder how that
Capataz died.” Conrad seems to leave little to choose between being “a
victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to
intellectual audacity” or a “victim of the disenchanted vanity which is the
reward of audacious action.” The brilliant intellectual and the magnificent
man of action are victimized alike for their audacity, and it is a fine irony
that “retribution” and “reward” become assimilated to one another. Yet the
book is Nostromo’s and not Decoud’s, and a “disenchanted vanity” is a
higher fate than a “disillusioned weariness,” if only because an initial
enchantment is a nobler state than an initial illusion. True that Nostromo’s
enchantment was only of and with himself, but that is proper for an
Achilles or a Hadji Murad. Decoud dies because he cannot bear solitude,
and so cannot bear himself. Nostromo finds death-in-life and then death
because he has lost the truth of his vanity, its enchanted insouciance, the
sprezzatura which he, a plebian, nevertheless had made his authentic self.
Nostromo’s triumph, though he cannot know it, is that an image of
this authenticity survives him, an image so powerful as to persuade both
Conrad and the perceptive reader that even the self-betrayed hero retains
an aesthetic dignity that renders his death tragic rather than sordid. Poor
Decoud, for all his brilliance, dies a nihilistic death, disappearing “without
a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things.” Nostromo,
after his death, receives an aesthetic tribute beyond all irony, in the superb
closing paragraph of the novel:

Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley, heard the


name pass over his head. It was another of Nostromo’s triumphs,
the greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true
cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala
to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by
a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of
the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf
containing his conquests of treasure and love.

Lord Jim

Lord Jim (1900) is the first of Conrad’s five great novels, followed by what
seems to me the finest, Nostromo (1904), and then by the marvelous
sequence of The Secret Agent (1906), Under Western Eyes (1910), and finally
Novelists and Novels 217

Victory (1914). Of these, it seems clear that Lord Jim has the closest to uni-
versal appeal; I have rarely met a reader who was not fascinated by it.
Martin Price, the subtlest of Conrad’s moral critics, prefers Lord Jim to
Nostromo because he finds that both the author’s skepticism and the
author’s romanticism are given their full scope in Lord Jim rather than in
Nostromo. Doubtless this is true, but Jim himself lacks the high romantic
appeal of the magnificent Nostromo, and I prefer also the corrosive skepti-
cism of Decoud to the skeptical wisdom of Marlow and Stein. Not that I
would deprecate Lord Jim; had Conrad written nothing else, this single
novel would have guaranteed his literary survival.
Aaron Fogel, writing on Nostromo, sees it as marking Conrad’s transi-
tion from an Oedipal emphasis (as in Lord Jim) to a representation of the
self ’s struggle against more outward influences. Certainly Jim’s struggle
does suit Fogel’s formulation of the earlier mode in Conrad: “the denial,
by internalization, of the Oedipal order of forced dialogue in the outside
world—the translation of inquisition into an inner feeling of compulsion
to quarrel with a forebear or with oneself.” Though there is much of
Conrad in Marlow, and a little of him in Stein, his true surrogate is surely
Jim, whose dialectics of defeat are in some sense a late version of Polish
romanticism, of the perpetual defeat of Polish heroism. This is only to inti-
mate that Jim’s Byronism is rather more Polish than British. Jim rarely
demands anything, and he never demands victory. One way of under-
standing the novel is to see how incomprehensible it would be if Conrad
had chosen to make his hero an American.
Marlow, our narrator, becomes something like a father to Jim, in an
implicit movement that has been shrewdly traced by Ian Watt. There is an
impressive irony in the clear contrast between the eloquent father, Marlow,
and the painfully inarticulate son, Jim. The relation between the two
poignantly enhances our sense of just how vulnerable Jim is and cannot cease
to be. Marlow is a survivor, capable of withstanding nearly the full range of
human experience, while Jim is doom-eager, as much a victim of the roman-
tic imagination as he is a belated instance of its intense appeal to us.
Albert J. Guerard associated Lord Jim with Absalom, Absalom! (a not
un-Conradian work) as novels that become different with each attentive
reading. Jim’s “simplicity” takes the place of the charismatic quality we
expect of the romantic protagonist, and Guerard sees Jim as marked by a
conflict between personality and will. But Jim’s personality remains a mys-
tery to us, almost despite Marlow, and Jim’s will is rarely operative, so far
as I can see. What we can know about Jim is the enormous strength and
prevalence of his fantasy-making powers, which we need not confuse with
a romantic imagination, since that hardly excludes self-knowledge. Indeed,
218 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the deepest puzzle of Jim is why should he fascinate anyone at all, let alone
Marlow, Stein, Conrad, and ourselves? Why is he endless to meditation?
Everyone who has read Lord Jim (and many who have not) remember
its most famous statement, which is Stein’s:

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the
sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people
endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr? ... No! I tell you! The
way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the
exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep
sea keep you up.

That describes Stein’s romanticism, but hardly Jim’s, since Jim cannot
swim in the dream-world. When he seems to make the destructive element
keep him up, as in Patusan, there would always have to be a Gentleman
Brown waiting for him. An imagination like Jim’s, which has little sense of
otherness, falls into identification as the truly destructive element, and the
error of identifying with the outrageous Brown is what kills Jim. Tony
Tanner deftly compares Brown to Iago, if only because Brown’s hatred for
Jim approximates Iago’s hatred for Othello, but Brown has a kind of rough
justice in denying Jim’s moral superiority. That returns us to the enigma of
Jim: why does he make such a difference for Marlow—and for us?
We know the difference between Jim and Brown, even if Jim cannot,
even as we know that Jim never will mature into Stein. Is Jim merely the
spirit of illusion, or does there linger in him something of the legitimate
spirit of romance? Marlow cannot answer the question, and we cannot
either, no matter how often we read Lord Jim. Is that a strength or a weak-
ness in this novel? That Conrad falls into obscurantism, particularly in
Heart of Darkness, is beyond denial. Is Lord Jim simply an instance of such
obscurantism on a larger scale?
Impressionist fiction necessarily forsakes the Idealist metaphysics of
the earlier romantic novel, a metaphysics that culminated in George Eliot.
Marlow beholding Jim is a concourse of sensations recording a flood of
impressions; how can a sensation distinguish whether an impression is
authentic or not? Yet Marlow is haunted by the image of heroism, and
finds an authentic realization of the image in Stein. The famous close of
Marlow’s narrative invokes Jim as an overwhelming force of real existence,
and also as a disembodied spirit among the shades:

“And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at


heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the
Novelists and Novels 219

wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring
shape of such an extraordinary success! For it may very well be
that in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance,
he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern
bride, had come veiled to his side.
“But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing
himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call of
his exalted egoism. He goes away from a living woman to cele-
brate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he
satisfied—quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of
us—and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer
for his eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all? Now he
is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes
to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet
upon my honour there are moments, too, when he passes from my
eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of his
earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own
world of shades.
“Who knows? He is gone, inscrutable at heart, and the poor
girl is leading a sort of soundless, inert life in Stein’s house. Stein
has aged greatly of late. He feels it himself, and says often that he
is ‘preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave ...’ while he waves
his hand sadly at his butterflies.”

Stein’s sadness is that he had hoped to find a successor in Jim and now
wanes into the sense that he is at the end of a tradition. Enigmatic as
always, Marlow cannot resolve his own attitude towards Jim. I do not sup-
pose that we can either and I wonder if that is necessarily an aesthetic
strength in Conrad’s novel. Perhaps it is enough that we are left pondering
our own inability to reconcile the authentic and the heroic.
N O V E L S
A N D

Edith Wharton
N O V E L I S T S

(1862–1937)

Age of Innocence

A PROFOUND STUDY OF EDITH WHARTON’S OWN NOSTALGIAS, THE AGE OF


Innocence (1920) achieved a large discerning audience immediately and has
retained it since. For Wharton herself, the novel was a prelude to her auto-
biography, A Backward Glance, published 14 years later and three years
before her death. Wharton, who was 57 in 1919 when The Age of Innocence
was in most part composed, associated herself with both her protagonists,
Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska. The Age of Innocence is a historical
novel set in socially prominent Old New York of the early 1870s, a vanished
world indeed when seen from a post–World War I perspective. Wrongly
regarded by many critics as a novel derived from Henry James, The Age of
Innocence is rather a deliberate complement to The Portrait of a Lady, seek-
ing and finding a perspective that James was conscious of having excluded
from his masterpiece. Wharton might well have called her novel The
Portrait of a Gentleman, since Newland Archer’s very name is an allusion to
Isabel Archer, a far more attractive and fascinating character than
Wharton’s unheroic gentleman of Old New York.
Not that Newland is anything but a very decent and good man who
will become a useful philanthropist and civic figure. Unfortunately, howev-
er, he has no insight whatsoever as to the differences between men and
women, and his passion is of poor quality compared to Ellen’s. R.W.B.
Lewis, Wharton’s biographer, regards The Age of Innocence as a minor mas-
terpiece. Time so far has confirmed Lewis’s judgment, but we now suffer
through an age of ideology, and I am uncertain as to whether The Age of
Innocence will be strong enough to endure. I have no doubts about
Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, but I wonder

220
Novelists and Novels 221

whether Newland Archer may yet sink his own book. The best historical
novel of Old New York, The Age of Innocence retains great interest both as
social history and as social anthropology. One is always startled by the
farewell dinner of Ellen Olenska, where Newland realizes that he is attend-
ing “the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the
tribe.” Wharton’s own judgment, as narrator, sums up this tribal expulsion.

It was the Old New York way of taking life “without effusion of
blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease,
who placed decency above courage, and who considered that
nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behavior of
those who gave rise to them.

That seems a condemnation of Old New York, and yet it is not.


Throughout the novel, Wharton acknowledges that Newland’s world cen-
ters upon an idea of order, a convention that stifles passion and yet liber-
ates from chaos. The old order at least was an order; Wharton was horri-
fied at the post–World War I United States. Newland Archer is flawed in
perception: of his world, of his wife, most of all of Ellen. And yet Wharton
subtly makes it clear that even a more courageous and perceptive Newland
would not have made a successful match with Ellen. Their relationship in
time must have dissolved, with Newland returning to the only tribe that
could sustain him. Henry James’s Isabel Archer, returning to her dreadful
husband Osmond, also accepts an idea of order, but one in which her
renunciation has a transcendental element. Wharton, shrewder if less sub-
lime than her friend James, gives us a more realistic yet a less consequen-
tial Archer.

The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton’s three principal women characters—Lily Bart, Undine


Spragg, Ellen Olenska—are remarkably varied, though Lily and Ellen
both are motherless members of Old New York society, and Undine is an
outsider who conquers and destroys that society, on her own egregious
terms. Lily, though she struggles tenaciously, is finally too weak to survive
the contradictions between her upbringing and her situation. It is Ellen,
superbly self-reliant, who reconciles her heritage and her dilemmas, and
who evokes our admiration. Lily dies of a sleeping-drug overdose; Undine,
the American answer to Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, holds on unpleasantly in
our memory; while Ellen, who has affinities to Henry James’s Isabel
Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, declines Isabel’s example, and flourishes
222 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

(so far as we know) apart from the dying society of Old New York, in which
Edith Wharton had been raised.
I once was outrageous enough to ask a group of students whom they
would choose—either to love or to be—among Lily, Undine, and Ellen,
and was startled by their consensus, which was Undine, since sensibly I had
expected Ellen to be their answer. Since I knew that they also had read
Vanity Fair, I protested that Becky Sharp was charming if unsettling, but
that Undine frightened me. She did not dismay them, whereas Lily’s ill
luck depressed them, and Ellen they felt was rather too good to be true.
Perhaps Wharton, a powerful ironist, would have appreciated their choice,
but to an archaic Romantic like myself, it came as a considerable surprise,
or as another instance of what my mentor, Frederick A. Pottle, had called
shifts of sensibility.
Undine, I protested lamely, was bad news, but they forgave her vul-
garity (as Wharton could not) and one of them accurately indicated that
the novel’s famous conclusion was now seriously outdated:

“Oh, that reminds me—” instead of obeying her he unfolded


the paper. “I brought it in to show you something. Jim Driscoll’s
been appointed Ambassador to England.”
“Jim Driscoll— !” She caught up the paper and stared at the
paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll—that pitiful nonentity, with
his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary
that the government should have hunted up such insignificant
people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splen-
dours they were going to—all the banquets and ceremonies and
precedences...
“I shouldn’t say she’d want to, with so few jewels—” She
dropped the paper and turned to her husband. “If you had a spark
of ambition, that’s the kind of thing you’d try for. You could have
got it just as easily as not!”
He laughed and thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes
with the gesture she disliked. “As it happens, it’s about the one
thing I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t? Why not?”
“Because you’re divorced. They won’t have divorced
Ambassadresses.”
“They won’t? Why not, I’d like to know?”
“Well, I guess the court ladies are afraid there’d be too many
pretty women in the Embassies,” he answered jocularly.
She burst into an angry laugh, and the blood flamed up into
Novelists and Novels 223

her face. “I never heard of anything so insulting!” she cried, as if


the rule had been invented to humiliate her.
There was a noise of motors backing and advancing in the
court, and she heard the first voices on the stairs. She turned to
give herself a last look in the glass, saw the blaze of rubies, the glit-
ter of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on her list.
But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had
learned that there was something she could never get, something
that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for
her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced
to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one
part she was really made for.

In our current political climate, Undine could well be appointed an


ambassador, and thus transcend being an Ambassador’s wife. It is eighty-
eight years since the publication of The Custom of the Country, and I have
met Undine many times, here and abroad, in the universities, the media,
and among diplomats. Wharton may have rendered Undine Spragg with a
vividness beyond authorial intention. One remembers Lily Bart for her
brave pathos, and Ellen Olenska for her decency and vitality. But Undine
Spragg is one of the great white sharks of literature: dangerous, distasteful,
and yet permanently valid as a representation of reality.

Ethan Frome

In 1911, two years before The Custom of the Country was published,
Wharton brought out the short novel that seems her most American story,
the New England tragedy Ethan Frome. I would guess that it is now her
most widely read book, and is likely to remain so. Certainly Ethan Frome is
Wharton’s only fiction to have become part of the American mythology,
though it is hardly an early-twentieth-century Scarlet Letter. Relentless and
stripped, Ethan Frome is tragedy not as Hawthorne wrote it, but in the
mode of pain and of a reductive moral sadism, akin perhaps to Robert
Penn Warren’s harshness toward his protagonists, particularly in World
Enough and Time. The book’s aesthetic fascination, for me, centers in
Wharton’s audacity in touching the limits of a reader’s capacity at absorb-
ing really extreme suffering, when that suffering is bleak, intolerable, and
in a clear sense unnecessary. Wharton’s astonishing authority here is to
render such pain with purity and economy, while making it seem
inevitable, as much in the nature of things and of psyches as in the social
customs of its place and time.
224 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

R.W.B. Lewis praises Ethan Frome as “a classic of the realistic genre”;


doubtless it is, and yet literary “realism” is itself intensely metaphorical, as
Lewis keenly knows. Ethan Frome is so charged in its representation of
reality as to be frequently phantasmagoric in effect. Its terrible vividness
estranges it subtly from mere naturalism, and makes its pain just bearable.
Presumably Edith Wharton would not have said: “Ethan Frome—that is
myself,” and yet he is more his author than Undine Spragg was to be. Like
Wharton, Ethan has an immense capacity for suffering, and an over-
whelming sense of reality; indeed like Edith Wharton, he has too strong a
sense of what was to be the Freudian reality principle.
Though an exact contemporary of Freud, Edith Wharton showed no
interest in him, but she became an emphatic Nietzschean, and Ethan Frome
manifests both a Nietzschean perspectivism, and an ascetic intensity that I
suspect goes back to a reading of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s precursor.
What fails in Ethan, and in his beloved Mattie, is precisely what
Schopenhauer urged us to overcome: the Will to Live, though suicide was
hardly a Schopenhauerian solution. In her introduction to Ethan Frome,
Wharton states a narrative principle that sounds more like Balzac,
Browning, or James, but that actually reflects the Nietzsche of The
Genealogy of Morals:

Each of my chroniclers contributes to the narrative just so much as


he or she is capable of understanding of what, to them, is a compli-
cated and mysterious case; and only the narrator of the tale has
scope enough to see it all, to resolve it back into simplicity, and to
put it in its rightful place among his larger categories.

But does Wharton’s narrator have scope enough to see all of the tale
that is Ethan Frome? Why is the narrator’s view more than only another
view, and a simplifying one at that? Wharton’s introduction memorably
calls her protagonists “these figures, my granite outcroppings; but half-
emerged from the soil, and scarcely more articulate.” Yet her narrator
(whatever her intentions) lacks the imagination to empathize with granite
outcroppings who are also men and women:

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and
moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his
facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was
in the gaps. But one phrase stuck in my memory and served as the
nucleus about which I grouped my subsequent inferences: “Guess
he’s been in Starkfield too many winters.”
Novelists and Novels 225

Before my own time there was up I had learned to know what


that meant. Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicy-
cle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the
scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys,
such as Bettsbridge and Shadd’s Falls, had libraries, theatres and
Y.M.C.A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for
recreation. But when winter shut down on Starkfield, and the vil-
lage lay under a sheet of snow perpetually renewed from the pale
skies, I began to see what life there—or rather its negation—must
have been in Ethan Frome’s young manhood.
I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with
the big power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn car-
penters’ strike had so delayed the work that I found myself
anchored at Starkfield—the nearest habitable spot—for the best
part of the winter. I chafed at first, and then, under the hypnotis-
ing effect of routine, gradually began to find a grim satisfaction in
the life. During the early part of my stay I had been struck by the
contrast between the vitality of the climate and the deadness of the
community. Day by day, after the December snows were over, a
blazing blue sky poured down torrents of light and air on the
white landscape, which gave them back in an intenser glitter. One
would have supposed that such an atmosphere must quicken the
emotions as well as the blood; but it seemed to produce no change
except that of retarding still more the sluggish pulse of Starkfield.
When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of
crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when
the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the
devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged
down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield
emerged from its six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitu-
lating without quarter. Twenty years earlier the means of resist-
ance must have been far fewer, and the enemy in command of
almost all the lines of access between the beleaguered villages;
and, considering these things, I felt the sinister force of Harmon’s
phrase: “Most of the smart ones get away.” But if that were the
case, how could any combination of obstacles have hindered the
flight of a man like Ethan Frome?

The narrator’s “mental and moral reach” is not in question, but his
vision has acute limitations. Winter indeed is the cultural issue, but Ethan
Frome is not exactly Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. It is
226 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

not a “combination of obstacles” that hindered the flight of Ethan Frome,


but a terrible fatalism which is a crucial part of Edith Wharton’s
Emersonian heritage. Certainly the narrator is right to express the contrast
between the winter sublimity of: “a blazing blue sky poured down torrents
of light and air on the white landscape, which gave them back in an
intenser glitter,” and the inability of the local population to give back more
than sunken apathy. But Frome, as the narrator says on the novel’s first
page, is himself a ruined version of the American Sublime: “the most strik-
ing figure in Starkfield ... his great height ... the careless powerful look he
had ... something bleak and unapproachable in his face.” Ethan Frome is
an Ahab who lacks Moby-Dick, self-lamed rather than wounded by the
white whale, and by the whiteness of the whale. Not the whiteness of
Starkfield but an inner whiteness or blankness has crippled Ethan Frome,
perhaps the whiteness that goes through American tradition “from
Edwards to Emerson” and on through Wharton to Wallace Stevens con-
templating the beach world lit by the glare of the Northern Lights in “The
Auroras of Autumn”:

Here, being visible is being white,


Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an exercise ...

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.


The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.


The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps


And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.

That, though with a more sublime eloquence, is the visionary world of


Ethan Frome, a world where the will is impotent, and tragedy is always cir-
cumstantial. The experiential puzzle of Ethan Frome is ultimately also its
aesthetic strength: we do not question the joint decision of Ethan and
Mattie to immolate themselves, even though it is pragmatically outrageous
and psychologically quite impossible. But the novel’s apparent realism is a
mask for its actual fatalistic mode, and truly it is a northern romance, akin
Novelists and Novels 227

even to Wuthering Heights. A visionary ethos dominates Ethan and Mattie,


and would have dominated Edith Wharton herself, had she not battled
against it with her powerful gift for social reductiveness. We can wonder
whether even The Age of Innocence, with its Jamesian renunciations in the
mode of The Portrait of a Lady, compensates us for what Wharton might
have written, had she gone on with her own version of the American
romance tradition of Hawthorne and Melville.
N O V E L S
A N D

Rudyard Kipling
N O V E L I S T S

(1865–1936)

TWENTY YEARS AFTER WRITING HIS ESSAY OF 1943 ON KIPLING (REPRINTED


in The Liberal Imagination, 1951), Lionel Trilling remarked that if he could
write the critique again, he would do it “less censoriously and with more
affectionate admiration.” Trilling, always the representative critic of his era,
reflected a movement in the evaluation of Kipling that still continues in
1987. I suspect that this movement will coexist with its dialectical counter-
movement, of recoil against Kipling, as long as our literary tradition lasts.
Kipling is an authentically popular writer, in every sense of the word. Stories
like “The Man Who Would Be King”; children’s tales from The Jungle
Books and the Just So Stories; the novel Kim, which is clearly Kipling’s mas-
terwork; certain late stories and dozens of ballads—these survive both as
high literature and as perpetual entertainment. It is as though Kipling had
set out to refute the Sublime function of literature, which is to make us for-
sake easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures.
In his speech on “Literature,” given in 1906, Kipling sketched a dark
tale of the storyteller’s destiny:

There is an ancient legend which tells us that when a man first


achieved a most notable deed he wished to explain to his Tribe what
he had done. As soon as he began to speak, however, he was smit-
ten with dumbness, he lacked words, and sat down. Then there
arose—according to the story—a masterless man, one who had
taken no part in the action of his fellow, who had no special virtues,
but who was afflicted—that is the phrase—with the magic of the
necessary word. He saw; he told; he described the merits of the

228
Novelists and Novels 229

notable deed in such a fashion, we are assured, that the words


“became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of all his hear-
ers.” Thereupon, the Tribe seeing that the words were certainly
alive, and fearing lest the man with the words would hand down
untrue tales about them to their children, took and killed him. But,
later, they saw that the magic was in the words, not in the man.

Seven years later, in the ghastly Primal History Scene of Totem and
Taboo’s fourth chapter, Freud depicted a curiously parallel scene, where a
violent primal father is murdered and devoured by his sons, who thus bring
to an end the patriarchal horde. Kipling’s Primal Storytelling Scene fea-
tures “a masterless man” whose only virtue is “the necessary word.” But he
too is slain by the Tribe or primal horde, lest he transmit fictions about the
Tribe to its children. Only later, in Freud, do the sons of the primal father
experience remorse, and so “the dead father became stronger than the liv-
ing one had been.” Only later, in Kipling, does the Tribe see “that the
magic was in the words, not in the man.”
Freud’s true subject, in his Primal History Scene, was the transference,
the carrying-over from earlier to later attachments of an over-determined
affect. The true subject of Kipling’s Primal Storytelling Scene is not so
much the Tale of the Tribe, or the magic that was in the words, but the sto-
ryteller’s freedom, the masterless man’s vocation that no longer leads to
death, but that can lead to a death-in-life. What Kipling denies is his great
fear, which is that the magic indeed is just as much in the masterless man
as it is in the words.
Kipling, with his burly imperialism and his indulgences in anti-intel-
lectualism, would seem at first out of place in the company of Walter Pater,
Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. Nevertheless, Kipling writes in the
rhetorical stance of an aesthete, and is very much a Paterian in the meta-
physical sense. The “Conclusion” to Pater’s Renaissance is precisely the
credo of Kipling’s protagonists:

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those


about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of
forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep
before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience
and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort
to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about
the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever
curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
230 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Frank Kermode observed that Kipling was a writer “who steadfastly


preferred action and machinery to the prevalent Art for Art’s Sake,” but
that is to misread weakly what Pater meant by ending the “Conclusion” to
The Renaissance with what soon became a notorious formula:

We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some


spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wis-
est, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song.
For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as
many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions
may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of
love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or
otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is
passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied
consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of
beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you
professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your
moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

Like Pater, like Nietzsche, Kipling sensed that we possess and cherish
fictions because the reductive truth would destroy us. “The love of art for
art’s sake” simply means that we choose to believe in a fiction, while know-
ing that it is not true, to adopt Wallace Stevens’s version of the Paterian
credo. And fiction, according to Kipling, was written by daemonic forces
within us, by “some tragic dividing of forces on their ways.” Those forces
are no more meaningful than the tales and ballads they produce. What
Kipling shares finally with Pater is a deep conviction that we are caught
always in a vortex of sensations, a solipsistic concourse of impressions pil-
ing upon one another, with great vividness but little consequence.

Kim

Kipling’s authentic precursor and literary hero was Mark Twain, whose
Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are reflected inescapably in Kim, certain-
ly Kipling’s finest achievement. “An Interview with Mark Twain” records
Kipling’s vision of the two hours of genial audience granted him, starting
with Twain’s:

“Well, you think you owe me something, and you’ve come to tell
me so. That’s what I call squaring a debt handsomely.”
Novelists and Novels 231

Kim, permanent work as it is, does not square the debt, partly because
Kim is, as David Bromwich notes, both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, which
is to confuse essentially opposed personalities. Since Kim is founded upon
Huckleberry Finn, and not on Don Quixote, the mixing of Huck and Tom in
Kim’s nature brings about a softening of focus that malforms the novel. We
cannot find Sancho Panza in Kim, though there is a touch of the Don, as
well as of Nigger Jim, in the lama. Insofar as he is free but lonely, Kim is
Huck; insofar as he serves the worldly powers, he is Tom. It is striking that
in his “Interview with Mark Twain,” Kipling expresses interest only in Tom
Sawyer, asking Twain “whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer
as a man.” I suspect that some anxiety of influence was involved, since Kim
is the son of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and not of the lesser novel.
Kim is one of the great instances in the language of a popular adven-
ture story that is also exalted literature. Huckleberry Finn is too astonishing
a book, too nearly the epic of the American consciousness, together with
Leaves of Grass and Moby-Dick, to be regarded as what it only pretends to
be: a good yarn. Kim stations itself partly in that mode which ranges from
Rider Haggard, at its nadir, to Robert Louis Stevenson, at its zenith: the
boy’s romance crossing over into the ancient form of romance proper.
There are many splendors in Kim, but the greatest is surely the rela-
tion between Kim and his master, the lovable, half-mad Tibetan lama, who
proves to be Kim’s true father, and to whom Kim becomes the best of sons.
It is a triumph of the exact representation of profound human affection,
rather than a sentimentality of any kind, that can move us to tears as the
book ends:

“Hear me! I bring news! The Search is finished. Comes now the
Reward: ... Thus. When we were among the Hills, I lived on thy
strength till the young branch bowed and nigh broke. When we
came out of the Hills, I was troubled for thee and for other mat-
ters which I held in my heart. The boat of my soul lacked direc-
tion; I could not see into the Cause of Things. So I gave thee over
to the virtuous woman altogether. I took no food. I drank no
water. Still I saw not the Way. They pressed food upon me and
cried at my shut door. So I removed myself to a hollow under a
tree. I took no food. I took no water. I sat in meditation two days
and two nights, abstracting my mind; inbreathing and outbreath-
ing in the required manner.... Upon the second night—so great
was my reward—the wise Soul loosed itself from the silly Body
and went free. This I have never before attained, though I have
stood on the threshold of it. Consider, for it is a marvel!”
232 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

“A marvel indeed. Two days and two nights without food!


Where was the Sahiba?” said Kim under his breath.
“Yea, my Soul went free, and, wheeling like an eagle, saw indeed
that there was no Teshoo Lama nor any other soul. As a drop
draws to water, so my soul drew near to the Great Soul which is
beyond all things. At that point, exalted in contemplation, I saw all
Hind, from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills, and my own Painted
Rocks at Such-zen; I saw every camp and village, to the least,
where we have ever rested. I saw them at one time and in one
place; for they were within the Soul. By this I knew the Soul had
passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things. By
this I knew that I was free. I saw thee lying in thy cot, and I saw
thee falling down hill under the idolater—at one time, in one
place, in my Soul, which, as I say, had touched the Great Soul.
Also I saw the stupid body of Teshoo Lama lying down, and the
bakim from Dacca kneeled beside, shouting in its ear. Then my
Soul was all alone, and I saw nothing, for I was all things, having
reached the Great Soul. And I meditated a thousand years, pas-
sionless, well aware of the Causes of all Things. Then a voice
cried: ‘What shall come to the boy if thou art dead?’ and I was
shaken back and forth in myself with pity for thee; and I said: ‘I
will return to my chela, lest he miss the Way.’ Upon this my Soul,
which is the soul of Teshoo Lama, withdrew itself from the Great
Soul with strivings and yearnings and retchings and agonies not to
be told. As the egg from the fish, as the fish from the water, as the
water from the cloud, as the cloud from the thick air, so put forth,
so leaped out, so drew away, so fumed up the soul of Teshoo Lama
from the Great Soul. Then a voice cried: ‘The River! Take heed
to the River!’ and I looked down upon all the world, which was as
I had seen it before—one in time, one in place—and I saw plainly
the River of the Arrow at my feet. At that hour my Soul was ham-
pered by some evil or other whereof I was not wholly cleansed,
and it lay upon my arms and coiled round my waist; but I put it
aside, and I cast forth as an eagle in my flight for the very place of
the River. I pushed aside world upon world for thy sake. I saw the
River below me—the River of the Arrow—and, descending, the
waters of it closed over me; and behold I was again in the body of
Teshoo Lama, but free from sin, and the bakim from Dacca bore
up my head in the waters of the River. It is here! It is behind the
mango-tope here—even here!”
“Allah Kerim! Oh, well that the Babu was by! Wast thou very wet?”
Novelists and Novels 233

“Why should I regard? I remember the bakim was concerned


for the body of Teshoo Lama. He haled it out of the holy water in
his hands, and there came afterwards thy horse-seller from the
North with a cot and men, and they put the body on the cot and
bore it up to the Sahiba’s house.”
“What said the Sahiba?”
“I was meditating in that body, and did not hear. So thus the
Search is ended. For the merit that I have acquired, the River of
the Arrow is here. It broke forth at our feet, as I have said. I have
found it. Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the
Threshold of Freedom to free thee from all sin—as I am free, and
sinless. Just is the Wheel! Certain is our deliverance. Come!”
He crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who
has won Salvation for himself and his beloved.

This long passage builds, through radiant apprehensions, to an


extraordinarily controlled and calm epiphany of parental love. The vision
of the lama, though it presents itself as the wise soul’s freedom from the
silly body, is clearly not dualistic, but is caused by the lama’s honest decla-
ration: “I was troubled for thee.” Caught up in the freedom from illusion,
and free therefore supposedly of any concern for other souls, since, like
one’s own, they are not, the lama is close to the final freedom: “for I was
all things.” The voice that cries him back to life is the voice of his fatherly
love for Kim, and the reward for his return to existence, negating mystical
transport, is his true vision of the River, goal of his quest. It breaks forth at
his feet, and is better than freedom, because it is not merely solitary, but is
Salvation for his beloved adopted son, as well as for himself.
Certainly this is Kipling’s most humane and hopeful moment, norma-
tive and positive. Kim is, like its more masterly precursor work, Huckleberry
Finn, a book that returns us to the central values, avoiding those shadows
of the abyss that hover uneasily elsewhere in Kipling. Yet even here the
darker and truer Kipling lingers, in the sudden vision of nothingness that
Kim experiences, only a few pages before his final reunion with the lama:

At first his legs bent like bad pipe-stems, and the flood and rush
of the sunlit air dazzled him. He squatted by the white wall, the
mind rummaging among the incidents of the long dooli journey,
the lama’s weaknesses, and, now that the stimulus of talk was
removed, his own self-pity, of which, like the sick, he had great
store. The unnerved brain edged away from all the outside, as a
raw horse, once rowelled, sidles from the spur. It was enough,
234 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

amply enough, that the spoil of the kilta was away—off his
hands—out of his possession. He tried to think of the lama,—to
wonder why he had tumbled into a brook,—but the bigness of the
world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked thought
aside. Then he looked upon the trees and the broad fields, with
the thatched huts hidden among crops—looked with strange eyes
unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things—
stared for a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could
not put it into words, that his soul was out of gear with its sur-
roundings—a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just
like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in
a corner. The breezes fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at
him, the noises of the populated house behind—squabbles, orders,
and reproofs—hit on dead ears.
“I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?” His soul repeated it
again and again.

Despite the Indian imagery and the characteristic obsession of Kipling


with machinery, the mark of Walter Pater’s aesthetic impressionism, with
its sensations beckoning us to the abyss, is clearly set upon this passage.
Identity flees with the flux of impressions, and the dazzlement of “the flood
and rush of the sunlit air” returns us to the cosmos of the “Conclusion” to
The Renaissance. Kipling’s art, in Kim, is after all art for art’s sake, in the
dark predicate that there is nothing else. The extravagant fiction of the
great love between an Irish boy gone native in India, half a Huck Finn
enthralled with freedom and half a Tom Sawyer playing games with
authority, and a quixotic, aged Tibetan lama is Kipling’s finest invention,
and moves us endlessly. But how extravagant a fiction it is, and had to be!
Kipling refused to profess the faith of those who live and die for and by art,
yet in the end he had no other faith.
N O V E L I S T S
Willa Cather

A N D
(1873–1947)

N O V E L S
WILLA CATHER, THOUGH NOW SOMEWHAT NEGLECTED, HAS FEW RIVALS
among the American novelists of this century. Critics and readers fre-
quently regard her as belonging to an earlier time, though she died in 1947.
Her best novels were published in the years 1918–31, so that truly she was
a novelist of the 1920’s, an older contemporary and peer of Hemingway and
of Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike them, she did not excel at the short story,
though there are some memorable exceptions scattered through her four
volumes of tales. Her strength is her novels and particularly, in my judg-
ment, My Ántonia (1918), A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s House
(1925); fictions worthy of a disciple of Flaubert and Henry James. Equally
beautiful and achieved, but rather less central, are the subsequent histori-
cal novels, the very popular Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and
Shadows on the Rock (1931). Her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), is only just
short of the eminence of this grand sequence. Six permanent novels is a
remarkable number for a modern American writer; I can think only of
Faulkner as Cather’s match in this respect, since he wrote six truly endur-
ing novels, all published during his great decade, 1929–39.
Cather’s remoteness from the fictive universe of Fitzgerald,
Hemingway and Faulkner is palpable, though all of them shared her nos-
talgia for an older America. She appears, at first, to have no aesthetic affini-
ties with her younger contemporaries. We associate her instead with Sarah
Orne Jewett, about whom she wrote a loving essay, or even with Edith
Wharton, whom she scarcely resembles. Cather’s mode of engaging with
the psychic realities of post–World War I America is more oblique than
Fitzgerald’s or Hemingway’s, but it is just as apposite a representation of
the era’s malaise. The short novel A Lost Lady (1923) is not out of its aes-
thetic context when we read it in the company of The Waste Land, The

235
236 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Comedian as the Letter C, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby and An
American Tragedy. Subtler and gentler than any of these, A Lost Lady ele-
gizes just as profoundly a lost radiance or harmony, a defeat of a peculiar-
ly American dream of innocence, grace, hope.

My Ántonia and A Lost Lady

Henry James, Cather’s guide both as critic and novelist, died in England
early in 1916. The year before, replying to H.G. Wells after being satirized
by him, James wrote a famous credo: “Art makes life, makes interest, makes
importance.” This is Cather’s faith also. One hears the voice of James
when, in her essay “On the Art of Fiction,” she writes: “Any first-rate novel
or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have
been sacrificed to it.” Those sacrifices of possibility upon the altar of form
were the ritual acts of Cather’s quite Paterian religion of art, too easily mis-
read as a growing religiosity by many critics commenting upon Death
Comes for the Archbishop. Herself a belated Aesthete, Cather emulated a
familiar pattern of being attracted by the aura and not the substance of
Roman Catholicism. New Mexico, and not Rome, is her place of the spir-
it, a spirit of the archaic and not of the supernatural.
Cather’s social attitudes were altogether archaic. She shared a kind of
Populist anti-Semitism with many American writers of her own generation
and the next: Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Ezra Pound,
Thomas Wolfe, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Her own version of anti-
Semitism is curiously marked by her related aversion to heterosexuality.
She had lost her first companion, Isabelle McClung, to a Jewish violinist,
Jan Hambourg, and the Jewish figures in her fiction clearly represent the
aggressivity of male sexuality. The Professor’s House is marred by the gratu-
itous identification of the commercial exploitation of Cather’s beloved
West with Marcellus, the Professor’s Jewish son-in-law. Doubtless,
Cather’s most unfortunate piece of writing was her notorious essay in
1914, “Potash and Perlmutter,” in which she lamented, mock-heroically,
that New York City was becoming too Jewish. Perhaps she was learning
the lesson of the master again, since she is repeating, in a lighter tone, the
complaint of Henry James in The American Scene (1907). She repeated her
own distaste for “Jewish critics,” tainted as they were by Freud, in the essay
on Sarah Orne Jewett written quite late in her career, provoking Lionel
Trilling to the just accusation that she had become a mere defender of gen-
tility, mystically concerned with pots and pans.
This dark side of Cather, though hardly a value in itself, would not
much matter except that it seeped into her fiction as a systemic resentment
Novelists and Novels 237

of her own era. Nietzsche, analyzing resentment, might be writing of


Cather. Freud, analyzing the relation between paranoia and homosexuali-
ty, might be writing of her also. I am wary of being reductive in such obser-
vations, and someone perpetually mugged by Feminist critics as “the
Patriarchal critic” is too battered to desire any further polemic. Cather, in
my judgment, is aesthetically strongest and most persuasive in her loving
depiction of her heroines and of Ántonia and the lost lady Mrs. Forrester
in particular. She resembles Thomas Hardy in absolutely nothing, except
in the remarkable ability to seduce the reader into joining the novelist at
falling in love with the heroine. I am haunted by memories of having fall-
en in love with Marty South in The Woodlanders, and with Ántonia and Mrs.
Forrester when I was a boy of fifteen. Rereading My Ántonia and A Lost
Lady now at fifty-four, I find that the love renews itself. I doubt that I am
falling again into what my late and honored teacher William K. Wimsatt
named as the Affective Fallacy, since love for a woman made up out of
words is necessarily a cognitive affair.
Cather’s strength at representation gives us Jim Burden and Niel
Herbert as her clear surrogates, unrealized perhaps as figures of sexual life,
but forcefully conveyed as figures of capable imagination, capable above all
of apprehending and transmitting the extraordinary actuality and visionary
intensity of Ántonia and Mrs. Forrester. Like her masters, James and Pater,
Cather had made her supposed deficiency into her strength, fulfilling the
overt program of Emersonian self-reliance. But nothing is got for nothing,
Emerson also indicated, and Cather, again like James and Pater, suffered
the reverse side of the law of Compensation. The flaws, aesthetic and
human, are there, even in My Ántonia, A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House,
but they scarcely diminish the beauty and dignity of three profound stud-
ies of American nostalgias.

II

Cather is hardly the only vital American novelist to have misread cre-
atively the spirit of his or her own work. Her essential imaginative knowl-
edge was of loss, which she interpreted temporally, though her loss was
aboriginal, in the Romantic mode of Wordsworth, Emerson and all their
varied descendants. The glory that had passed away belonged not to the
pioneers but to her own transparent eyeball, her own original relation to
the universe. Rhetorically, she manifests this knowledge, which frequently
is at odds with her overt thematicism. Here is Jim Burden’s first shared
moment with Ántonia, when they both were little children:
238 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled
up like a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper. Ántonia
pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave
her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I
told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like “ice.”
She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky,
with movements so quick and impulsive that she distracted me,
and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees and
wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her
head, then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.
“Oh,” I exclaimed, “blue; blue sky.”
She clapped her hands and murmured, “Blue sky, blue eyes,” as
if it amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind,
she learned a score of words. She was quick, and very eager. We
were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue
sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully
pleasant. After Ántonia had said the new words over and over, she
wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on her mid-
dle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite
sternly. I didn’t want her ring, and I felt there was something reck-
less and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she
had never seen before. No wonder Krajiek got the better of these
people, if this was how they behaved.

One imagines that Turgenev would have admired this, and it would
not be out of place inserted in his A Sportman’s Sketchbook. Its naturalistic
simplicity is deceptive. Wallace Stevens, in a letter of 1940, observed of
Cather: “you may think she is more or less formless. Nevertheless, we have
nothing better than she is. She takes so much pains to conceal her sophis-
tication that it is easy to miss her quality.” The quality here is partly man-
ifested by an exuberance of trope and a precision of diction, both in the
service of a fresh American myth of origin. Nesting and curling up in an
embowered world of baby rabbits and grasshoppers, the children are at
home in a universe of “blue sky, blue eyes.” Heaven and earth come
together, where vision confronts only the gold of trees. Ántonia, offering
the fullness of a symbolic union to him, is rebuffed partly by the boy’s shy-
ness, and partly by Cather’s own proleptic fear that the reckless generosity
of the pioneer is doomed to exploitation. Yet the passage’s deepest intima-
tion is that Jim, though falling in love with Ántonia, is constrained by an
inner recalcitrance, which the reader is free to interpret in several ways,
none of which need exclude the others.
Novelists and Novels 239

This is Cather in the springtide of her imagination. In her vision’s


early fall, we find ourselves regarding her lost lady Mrs. Forrester and we
are comforted, as the boy Niel Herbert is, “in the quick recognition of her
eyes, in the living quality of her voice itself.” The book’s splendor is that,
like Mrs. Forrester’s laughter, “it often told you a great deal that was both
too direct and too elusive for words.” As John Hollander shrewdly notes,
Mrs. Forrester does not become a lost lady in any social or moral sense, but
imaginatively she is transformed into Niel’s “long-lost lady.” Lost or
refound, she is “his” always, even as Ántonia always remains Jim Burden’s
“my Ántonia.” In her ability to suggest a love that is permanent, life-
enhancing, and in no way possessive, Cather touches the farthest limit of
her own strength as a novelist. If one could choose a single passage from
all her work, it would be the Paterian epiphany or privileged moment in
which Mrs. Forrester’s image returned to Niel as “a bright, impersonal
memory.” Pater ought to have lived to have read this marvelous instance
of the art he had celebrated and helped to stimulate in Cather:

Her eyes; when they laughed for a moment into one’s own,
seemed to provide a wild delight that he had not found in life. “I
know where it is,” they seemed to say, “I could show you!” He
would like to call up the shade of the young Mrs. Forrester, as the
witch of Endor called up Samuel’s, and challenge it, demand the
secret of that ardour; ask her whether she had really found some
ever-blooming, ever-burning, ever-piercing joy, or whether it was
all fine play-acting. Probably she had found no more than anoth-
er; but she had always the power of suggesting things much love-
lier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the
whole sweetness of spring.

It is the perfection of Cather’s difficult art, when that art was most bal-
anced and paced, and Mrs. Forrester here is the emblem of that perfection.
Cather’s fiction, at its frequent best, also suggests things much lovelier
than itself. The reader, demanding the secret of Cather’s ardour, learns not
to challenge what may be remarkably fine play-acting, since Cather’s feign-
ing sometimes does persuade him that really she had found some perpetu-
al joy.
N O V E L S
A N D

Herman Hesse
N O V E L I S T S

(1877–1962)

Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) and Steppenwolf

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, BOTH THOMAS MANN’S DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1947) AND
Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943) were accepted as the two
indubitable post–World War II German classics. Hesse, on the strength of
The Glass Bead Game, his final novel, joined Mann as a Nobel laureate. The
two novels seemed the last words of an older, Liberal Germany upon the
dreadful debasement of the German spirit under the Nazis.
Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Hesse’s Steppenwolf each attracts more
readers today than Doctor Faustus and The Glass Bead Game, at least in the
United States, if not also in Germany. The ironies of both Mann and Hesse
have obscured their comedic aspects: Thomas von der Trave in The Glass
Bead Game is a parodistic portrait of Thomas Mann, while Hesse’s Fritz
Tegularius plainly parodies Friedrich Nietzsche, and his Father Jacobus is
an ironical version of Jakob Burckhardt.
Hesse had a posthumous revival in the Counter-Cultural American
Seventies, when Demian, Siddhartha, and Steppenwolf suited the Zeitgeist.
The complex allegory of The Glass Bead Game attracted far fewer readers,
though for a time Doctor Faustus had a substantial audience. Today both
books, though admirably composed, are rather neglected, and rereading
demonstrates that each remains considerably more than a Period Piece.
The dumbing-down of high culture makes the survival of either book
somewhat problematical, alas.
In some ways the Glass Bead Game, the game rather than the book, can
now be regarded as a synthesis of Western literary and musical culture akin
to the Western Canons of literature and of “classical” music. The imaginary
province of Castalia (the fountain of the Muses) is a science-fiction

240
Novelists and Novels 241

projection into a nonexistent cultural future. Joseph Knecht (whose name


means “servant”) is both the fulfillment and the reduction of the Castalian
aesthetic ideal.
I find myself, in 2002, regarding Hesse’s Castalia with a certain nos-
talgia, for its equivalents in literary criticism—such as the work of E.R.
Curtius, Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke—largely have been replaced by
the curious entity now called Cultural Studies in most Anglo-American
universities. As a strenuous opponent of Cultural Studies, I myself have
just published a vast book that is a kind of Kabbalistic Glass Bead Game,
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. Hesse is not
among those minds (though Mann is) but I find myself ironically wonder-
ing if my book is not, after all, another vision of Castalia, another
metaphor for a waning, soon perhaps to be lost high culture.
Aestheticism, in the face of the Nazi horror, seemed not a pragmatic
possibility for Hesse and for Mann. Without necessarily regarding both
The Glass Bead Game and Doctor Faustus as more than great but flawed fic-
tions, Aestheticism in 2002 hardly seems a useless alternative to the Age of
Information, Corporate corruption, and Bushian bellicose sanctimonious-
ness. Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare and Dante seem absolute goods in them-
selves, even when cut off from our dwindling cultural possibilities.
Castalia, rejected by Knecht, looks very different to me in 2002 than
it did in the 1940s. The American equivalent of the musical aspect of the
Glass Bead Game is the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington,
Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk.
An American Castalia might counterpoint classic jazz with the superb
American poetical tradition: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Robert
Frost and T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane and Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill and
John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons. Our Glass Bead Game might fuse
Charlie Parker and Wallace Stevens, thus synthesizing an art of nuance
that transcends the concerns and the capacities of Cultural Criticism.
In 2002, the sacrifice of Joseph Knecht seems to me a spiritual mistake.
The cultural commissars of Resentment regard Knecht’s demise as anoth-
er proof of their polemic that all art must be political. Hesse, a sensitive
lyric novelist, was not an adequate prophet of the cultural malaise we all
need to combine to defeat.
N O V E L S
A N D

Upton Sinclair
N O V E L I S T S

(1878–1968)

The Jungle

MY INTRODUCTION RELUCTANTLY ADMITS THAT THE JUNGLE (1906) IS A


period piece: to read it, one puts one’s uphill shoulder to the wheel, and
feels proper gratitude to Upton Sinclair’s book, which helped give us the
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
Jon A. Yoder sadly comments that the public received The Jungle as
muckraking, rather than as an indictment of capitalism, while Michael
Brewster Folsom accurately indicts Upton Sinclair for racism, and for
spoiling his novel’s conclusion.
A poignant defense of the book is offered by the scholarly and brilliant
Morris Dickstein, who tries to save The Jungle by citing our New Age of
the nonfiction novel and the New Journalism.
Timothy Cook usefully traces the influence of Upton Sinclair’s novel
upon George Orwell’s Animal Farm, after which Carl S. Smith recounts
Sinclair’s description of the stockyards as a “combination of Babel, bedlam,
and hell.”
In R.N. Mookerjee’s reading, the novel comes apart when Sinclair
moves from a vision of human suffering to a sermon for socialism, while
Emory Elliott, though acknowledging Sinclair’s racism, praised him for
showing the destructive effect upon poor people when they live without
hope for the future.
The analogue between Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and The
Jungle is worked through by Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, after which
Scott Derrick meditates upon Sinclair’s bondage to masculine myths of
gender-rules.
In this volume’s final essay, Matthew J. Morris interestingly analyzes

242
Novelists and Novels 243

Sinclair’s unsuccessful struggle to find a narrative mode that could show


the killing power of capitalism without adding just one more representa-
tion of that power that involuntarily helps to prolong it.
In his ninety years Upton Sinclair wrote ninety books, almost got
elected Governor of California (1934), and died knowing that he had
helped pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and had lived to be
Lyndon Johnson’s guest observer of the signing of the Wholesome Meat
Act (1967). That is hardly a wasted life, though The Jungle is now only a
rather drab period piece, and the other books are totally unreadable.
Morris Dickstein and Emory Elliott between them have done as much
as can be done for The Jungle, which I have just reread, with curiosity and
revulsion, more than half a century after my first encounter with the book.
I dimly recall having found it both somber and harrowing, but I was very
young, and both experiential and literary sorrows have made me more
impatient with it now. American naturalistic writing can survive a certain
crudity in style and procedure; Dreiser in particular transcends such limi-
tations in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. But Sinclair has nothing
of Dreiser’s preternatural powers of empathy. What Sinclair tries to do is
simply beyond his gifts: his people are names on the page, and his inabili-
ty to represent social reality makes me long for Balzac and Zola, or even
Tom Wolfe.
Time is cruel to inadequate literature, though it can be slow in its
remorselessness. The young have a remarkable taste for period pieces; I
note that my paperback copy of The Jungle, published in 1981, is in its thir-
ty-third printing, and I suspect that most of it has been sold to younger
people, in or out of class. I meditate incessantly on the phenomenon of
period pieces, surrounded as I am by so many bad books proclaimed as
instant classics, while John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981), a fantasy novel I
have read through scores of times, is usually out-of-print, as it is at the
moment. Patience, patience. The Harry Potter books will be on the rub-
bish piles, though after I myself are gone, and Little, Big will join the Alice
books of Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
As a literary critic who has covered the waterfront, for a while now, I
find the mountain of mail that comes to me instructive, even though I can-
not answer it, or even acknowledge it, if I myself am to go on reading, writ-
ing, teaching, and living. The two constant piles of vituperative missives
come from Oxfordians, poor souls desperate to prove that Edward De Vere
wrote all of Shakespeare, and Harry Potterites, of all ages and nationalities.
The rage of the partisans of the Earl of Oxford, though crazy and unpleas-
ant, baffles me less than the outrage of the legions of Potterites. Why are
they so vulnerable to having their taste and judgment questioned?
244 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

No matter how fiercely we dumb down, led in this by The New York
Times Book Review and the once-elite universities, period pieces seem to
induce uneasy sensations in their contemporary enthusiasts. On tour in
Turin, a year ago, I found myself talking about my How to Read and Why
(Italian version) at an academy for writers called the Holden School, in
honor of Salinger’s hero. When the school’s head, my host, a novelist,
asked me why my book said nothing about The Catcher in the Rye, I gently
intimated that I considered it a period piece, that would go on, perhaps for
quite a while, but then would perish. Honest judgment has its costs, and I
was shown out rather coldly when I departed. All critics, I know, are sub-
ject to error: my hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson, nodded in the terrible sen-
tence: “Tristram Shandy did not last.” And yet I wonder, as I age onwards,
what it is in us that makes us so bitter when period pieces expire, if we are
one of the survivors of a dead vogue?
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
Stephen Crane
(1879–1900)

N O V E L S
STEPHEN CRANE’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE CANON OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
is fairly slight in bulk: one classic short novel, three vivid stories, and two or
three ironic lyrics. The Red Badge of Courage; “The Open Boat,” “The Blue
Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”; “War is Kind” and “A Man
Adrift on a Slim Spar”—a single small volume can hold them all. Crane was
dead at twenty-eight, after a frantic life, but a longer existence probably
would not have enhanced his achievement. He was an exemplary American
writer, flaring in the forehead of the morning sky and vanishing in the high
noon of our evening land. An original, if not quite a Great Original, he
prophesied Hemingway and our other journalist-novelists and still seems a
forerunner of much to come.

The Red Badge of Courage

Rereading The Red Badge of Courage, it is difficult to believe that it was writ-
ten by a young man not yet twenty-four, who had never seen battle. Dead
of tuberculosis at twenty-eight, Stephen Crane nevertheless had written a
canonical novel, three remarkable stories, and a handful of permanent
poems. He was a singular phenomenon: his father, grandfather and great-
uncle all were evangelical Methodists, intensely puritanical. Crane, preco-
cious both as man-of-letters and as journalist, kept living out what Freud
called “rescue of fantasies,” frequently with prostitutes. His common-law
marriage, which sustained him until his early death, was with Cora Taylor,
whom he first met when she was madame of a Florida bordello.
Incongruously, Crane—who was persona non-grata to the New York City
police—lived a brief, exalted final phase in England, where he became close
to the great novelists Joseph Conrad and Henry James, both of whom
greatly admired Crane’s writing.

245
246 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Had Crane lived, he doubtless would have continued his epic impres-
sions of war, and confirmed his status as a crucial forerunner of Ernest
Hemingway. And yet his actual observations of battle, of Americans against
Spaniards in Cuba, and of Greeks against Turks, led to war-writing great-
ly inferior to his imaginings in The Red Badge of Courage. Perhaps Crane
would have developed in other directions, had he survived. It is difficult to
envision Crane improving upon The Red Badge of Courage, which is better
battle-writing than Hemingway and Norman Mailer could accomplish.
The great visionaries of warfare—Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—
necessarily are beyond Crane’s art, but in American literature he is sur-
passed in this mode only by the Cormac McCarthy of Blood Meridian.
McCarthy writes in the baroque, high rhetorical manner of Melville and
Faulkner. Crane, a very original impressionist, was a Conradian before he
read Conrad. I sometimes hear Kipling’s prose style in Crane, but the
echoes are indistinct and fleeting, almost as though the battlefield vision-
ary had just read The Jungle Book. Kipling, though also a great journalist,
could not provide Crane with a paradigm to assist in the recreation of the
bloody battle of Chancellorsville (May 2–4, 1863). Harold Beaver suggests
that Stendhal and Tolstoy did that labor for Crane, which is highly feasi-
ble, and Beaver is also interesting in suggesting that Crane invented a kind
of expressionism in his hallucinatory, camera-eye visions, as here in
Chapter 7 of the Red Badge:

Once he found himself almost into a swamp. He was obliged to


walk upon bog tufts and watch his feet to keep from the oily mire.
Pausing at one time to look about him he saw, out at some black
water, a small animal pounce in and emerge directly with a gleam-
ing fish.
The youth went again into the deep thickets. The brushed branch-
es made a noise that drowned the sound of cannon. He walked on,
going from obscurity into promises of a greater obscurity.
At length he reached a place where the high, arching boughs
made a chapel. He softly pushed the green doors aside and
entered. Pine needles were a gentle brown carpet. There was a
religious half light.
Near the threshold he stopped, horror-stricken at the sight of
a thing.
He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his
back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uni-
form that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy
shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the
Novelists and Novels 247

dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was
open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray
skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a
bundle along the upper lip.

This is a kind of pure, visual irony, nihilistic and parodistic, beyond


meaning, or with meanings beyond control. On a grander scale, here is the
famous account of the color sergeant’s death in Chapter 19:

Over the field went the scurrying mass. It was a handful of men
splattered into the faces of the enemy. Toward it instantly sprang
the yellow tongues. A vast quantity of blue smoke hung before
them. A mighty banging made ears valueless.
The youth ran like a madman to reach the woods before a bul-
let could discover him. He ducked his head low, like a football
player. In his haste his eyes almost closed, and the scene was a wild
blur. Pulsating saliva stood at the corners of his mouth.
Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a
despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a cre-
ation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that
bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a
woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the
voice of his hopes. Because no harm could come to it he endowed
it with power. He kept near, as if it could be a saver of lives, and
an imploring cry went from his mind.
In the mad scramble he was aware that the color sergeant
flinched suddenly, as if struck by a bludgeon. He faltered, and
then became motionless, save for his quivery knees.
He made a spring and a clutch at the pole. At the same instant
his friend grabbed it from the other side. They jerked at it, stout
and furious, but the color sergeant was dead, and the corpse would
not relinquish its trust. For a moment there was a grim encounter.
The dead man, swinging with bended back, seemed to be obsti-
nately tugging, in ludicrous and awful ways, for the possession of
the flag.
It was past in an instant of time. They wrenched the flag furi-
ously from the dead man, and, as they turned again, the corpse
swayed forward with bowed head. One arm swung high, and the
curved hand fell with heavy protest on the friend’s unheeding
shoulder.
248 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The flag and the color sergeant’s corpse become assimilated to one
another, and the phantasmagoria of the flag-as-woman is highly ambiva-
lent, being both an object of desire, and potentially destructive: “hating
and loving.” Crane’s vision again is nihilistic, and reminds us that even his
title is an irony, since the ultimate red badge of courage would be a death-
wound.

Maggie

As in his masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane


relies upon pure imagination in composing his first narrative fiction,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Crane had never seen a battle when he
wrote The Red Badge of Courage, and he scarcely had encountered the low
life of the Bowery before he produced Maggie. Ironically, he was to have all
too much of slum life after Maggie was printed, and to see more than
enough bloodshed as a war correspondent, after The Red Badge of Courage
had made him famous.
Maggie is a curious book to reread, partly because of its corrosive
irony, but also it hurts to encounter again the over-determined ruin of poor
Maggie. Her ghastly family, dreadful lover, and incessant poverty all drive
her into prostitution and the ambiguous death by drowning, which may be
suicide or victimage by murder.
The minimal but authentic aesthetic dignity of Maggie results from
the strangeness so frequently characteristic of nineteenth-century realism
and naturalism. Zola, whose influence seems strong in Maggie, actually
created a visionary naturalism, more phantasmagoric than realistic. Crane,
impressionist and ironist, goes even further in Maggie, a laconic experi-
ment in word-painting. Crane’s imagery is Hogarthian yet modified by an
original perspectivism, irrealistic and verging upon surrealism. Maggie
herself is an uncanny prophecy of what was to be the central relationship
of Crane’s brief life, his affair with Cora Taylor, who ran a bordello in
Jacksonville, Florida. She accompanied him to England, where their
friends included Joseph Conrad and Henry James, and she sustained him
through the agony of his early death.
N O V E L I S T S
E.M. Forster

A N D
(1879–1970)

N O V E L S
Howards End and A Passage to India

E.M. FORSTER’S CANONICAL CRITIC WAS LIONEL TRILLING, WHO MIGHT


have written Forster’s novels had Forster not written them and had Trilling
been English. Trilling ended his book on Forster (1924) with the tribute that
forever exalts the author of Howards End and A Passage to India as one of those
storytellers whose efforts “work without man’s consciousness of them, and even
against his conscious will.” In Trilling’s sympathetic interpretation (or identifi-
cation), Forster was the true antithesis to the world of telegrams and anger:

A world at war is necessarily a world of will; in a world at war


Forster reminds us of a world where the will is not everything, of
a world of true order, of the necessary connection of passion and
prose, and of the strange paradoxes of being human. He is one of
those who raise the shield of Achilles, which is the moral intelli-
gence of art, against the panic and emptiness which make their
onset when the will is tired from its own excess.

Trilling subtly echoed Forster’s own response to World War I, a response


which Forster recalled as an immersion in Blake, William Morris, the early
T.S. Eliot, J.K. Huysmans, Yeats: “They took me into a country where the
will was not everything.” Yet one can wonder whether Forster and Trilling,
prophets of the liberal imagination, did not yield to a vision where there
was not quite enough conscious will. A Passage to India, Forster’s most
famous work, can sustain many rereadings, so intricate is its orchestration.
It is one of only a few novels of this century that is written-through, in the
musical sense of thorough composition. But reading it yet again, after

249
250 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

twenty years away from it, I find it to be a narrative all of whose principal
figures—Aziz, Fielding, Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, Godbole—lack con-
scious will. Doubtless, this is Forster’s deliberate art, but the consequence
is curious; the characters do not sustain rereading so well as the novel does,
because none is larger than the book. Poldy holds my imagination quite
apart from Joyce’s Ulysses, as Isabel Archer does in James’s The Portrait of a
Lady, or indeed as Mrs. Wilcox does in Forster’s Howards End, at least while
she is represented as being alive. The aesthetic puzzle of A Passage to India
is why Aziz and Fielding could not have been stronger and more vivid
beings than they are.
What matters most in A Passage to India is India, and not any Indians
nor any English. But this assertion requires amendment, since Forster’s
India is not so much a social or cultural reality as it is an enigmatic vision
of the Hindu religion, or rather of the Hindu religion as it is reimagined
by the English liberal mind at its most sensitive and scrupulous. The
largest surprise of a careful rereading of A Passage to India after so many
years is that, in some aspects, it now seems a strikingly religious book.
Forster shows us what we never ought to have forgotten, which is that any
distinction between religious and secular literature is finally a mere politi-
cal or societal polemic, but is neither a spiritual nor an aesthetic judgment.
There is no sacred literature and no post-sacred literature, great or good.
A Passage to India falls perhaps just short of greatness, in a strict aesthetic
judgment, but spiritually it is an extraordinary achievement.
T.S. Eliot consciously strove to be a devotional poet, and certainly did
become a Christian polemicist as a cultural and literary critic. Forster, an
amiable freethinker and secular humanist, in his Commonplace Book
admirably compared himself to Eliot:

With Eliot? I feel now to be as far ahead of him as I was once


behind. Always a distance—and a respectful one. How I dislike his
homage to pain! What a mind except the human could have
excogitated it? Of course there’s pain on and off through each
individual’s life, and pain at the end of most lives. You can’t shirk
it and so on. But why should it be endorsed by the schoolmaster
and sanctified by the priest

until the fire and the rose are

one when so much of it is caused by disease or by bullies? It is here


that Eliot becomes unsatisfactory as a seer.
Novelists and Novels 251

One could add: it is here that Forster becomes most satisfactory as a


seer, for that is the peculiar excellence of A Passage to India. We are remind-
ed that Forster is another of John Ruskin’s heirs, together with Proust,
whom Forster rightly admired above all other modern novelists. Forster
too wishes to make us see, in the hope that by seeing we will learn to con-
nect, with ourselves and with others, and like Ruskin, Forster knows that
seeing in this strong sense is religious, but in a mode beyond dogmatism.

II

A Passage to India, published in 1924, reflects Forster’s service as pri-


vate secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior in 1921–22, which
in turn issued from his Indian visit of 1912–13 with G. Lowes Dickinson.
It was not until 1953 that Forster published The Hill of Devi, utilizing let-
ters he had written home from India, both forty and thirty years before.
The Hill of Devi celebrates Forster’s Maharajah as a kind of saint, indeed as
a religious genius, though Forster is anything but persuasive when he
attempts to sustain his judgment of his friend and employer. What does
come through is Forster’s appreciation of certain elements in Hinduism, an
appreciation that achieves its apotheosis in A Passage to India, and particu-
larly in “Temple,” the novel’s foreshortened final part. Forster’s ultimate
tribute to his Maharajah, a muddler in practical matters and so one who
died in disgrace, is a singular testimony for a freethinker. The Hill of Devi
concludes with what must be called a mystical apprehension:

His religion was the deepest thing in him. It ought to be studied—


neither by the psychologist nor by the mythologist but by the
individual who has experienced similar promptings. He penetrat-
ed in to rare regions and he was always hoping that others would
follow him there.

What are those promptings? Where are those regions? Are these the
questions fleshed out by A Passage to India? After observing the mystical
Maharajah dance before the altar of the God Krishna, Forster quotes from
a letter by the Maharajah describing the festival, and then attempts what
replies seem possible:

Such was his account. But what did he feel when he danced like
King David before the altar? What were his religious opinions?
The first question is easier to answer than the second. He felt
as King David and other mystics have felt when they are in the
252 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

mystic state. He presented well-known characteristics. He was


convinced that he was in touch with the reality he called Krishna.
And he was unconscious of the world around him. “You can come
in during my observances tomorrow and see me if you like, but I
shall not know that you are there,” he once told Malcolm. And he
didn’t know. He was in an abnormal but recognisable state; psy-
chologists have studied it.
More interesting, and more elusive, are his religious opinions.
The unseen was always close to him, even when he was joking or
intriguing. Red paint on a stone could evoke it. Like most people,
he implied beliefs and formulated rules for behaviour, and since he
had a lively mind, he was often inconsistent. It was difficult to be
sure what he did believe (outside the great mystic moments) or
what he thought right or wrong. Indians are even more puzzling
than Westerners here. Mr. Shastri, a spiritual and subtle Brahmin,
once uttered a puzzler: “If the Gods do a thing, it is a reason for
men not to do it.” No doubt he was in a particular religious mood.
In another mood he would have urged us to imitate the Gods. And
the Maharajah was all moods. They played over his face, they agi-
tated his delicate feet and hands. To get any pronouncement from
so mercurial a creature on the subject, say, of asceticism, was
impossible. As a boy, he had thought of retiring from the world,
and it was an ideal which he cherished throughout his life, and
which, at the end, he would have done well to practise. Yet he
would condemn asceticism, declare that salvation could not be
reached through it, that it might be Vedantic but it was not Vedic,
and matter and spirit must both be given their due. Nothing too
much! In such a mood he seemed Greek.
He believed in the heart, and here we reach firmer ground. “I
stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head,” cries Herman
Melville, and he would have agreed. Affection, or the possibility of
it, quivered through everything, from Gokul Ashtami down to
daily human relationships. When I returned to England and he
heard that I was worried because the post-war world of the ‘20’s
would not add up into sense, he sent me a message. “Tell him,” it
ran, “tell him from me to follow his heart, and his mind will see
everything clear.” The message as phrased is too facile: doors
open into silliness at once. But to remember and respect and pre-
fer the heart, to have the instinct which follows it wherever possi-
ble—what surer help than that could one have through life? What
better hope of clarification? Melville goes on: “The reason that
Novelists and Novels 253

the mass of men fear God and at bottom dislike Him, is because
they rather distrust His heart.” With that too he would have
agreed.

With all respect for Forster, neither he nor his prince is coherent here,
and I suspect that Forster is weakly misreading Melville, who is both more
ironic and more Gnostic than Forster chooses to realize. Melville, too, dis-
trusts the heart of Jehovah, and consigns the head to the dogs precisely
because he associates the head with Jehovah and identifies Jehovah with
the Demiurge, the god of this world. More vital would be the question:
what does Professor Godbole in A Passage to India believe? Is he more
coherent than the Maharajah, and does Forster himself achieve a more
unified vision there than he does in The Hill of Devi?
Criticism from Lionel Trilling on has evaded these questions, but such
evasion is inevitable because Forster may be vulnerable to the indictment
that he himself made against Joseph Conrad, to the effect that

he is misty in the middle as well as at the edges, that the secret cas-
ket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel; and that we
need not try to write him down philosophically, because there is,
in this particular direction, nothing to write. No creed, in fact.
Only opinions, and the right to throw them overboard when facts
make them look absurd. Opinions held under the semblance of
eternity, girt with the sea, crowned with the stars, and therefore
easily mistaken for a creed.

Heart of Darkness sustains Forster’s gentle wit, but Nostromo does not. Is
there a vapor rather than a jewel in Forster’s consciousness of Hinduism,
at least as represented in A Passage to India? “Hinduism” may be the wrong
word in that question; “religion” would be better, and “spirituality” better
yet. For I do not read Forster as being either hungry for belief or skeptical
of it. Rather, he seems to me an Alexandrian, of the third century before
the common era, an age celebrated in his Alexandria: A History and a Guide
(1922), a book that goes back to his happy years in Alexandria (1915–19).
In some curious sense, Forster’s India is Alexandrian, and his vision of
Hinduism is Plotinean. A Passage to India is a narrative of Neo-Platonic
spirituality, and the true heroine of that narrative, Mrs. Moore, is the
Alexandrian figure of Wisdom, the Sophia, as set forth in the Hellenistic
Jewish Wisdom of Solomon. Of Wisdom, or Sophia, Forster says: “She is
a messenger who bridges the gulf and makes us friends of God,” which is
a useful description of the narrative function of Mrs. Moore. And after
254 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

quoting Plotinus (in a passage that includes one of his book’s epigraphs):
“To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen,”
Forster comments:

This sublime passage suggests three comments, with which our


glance at Plotinus must close. In the first place its tone is religious,
and in this it is typical of all Alexandrian philosophy. In the second
place it lays stress on behaviour and training; the Supreme Vision
cannot be acquired by magic tricks—only those will see it who are
fit to see. And in the third place the vision of oneself and the vision
of God are really the same, because each individual is God, if only
he knew it. And here is the great difference between Plotinus and
Christianity. The Christian promise is that a man shall see God,
the Neo-Platonic—like the Indian—that he shall be God.
Perhaps, on the quays of Alexandria, Plotinus talked with Hindu
merchants who came to the town. At all events his system can be
paralleled in the religious writings of India. He comes nearer than
any other Greek philosopher to the thought of the East.

Forster’s Alexandria is in the first place personal; he associated the city


always with his sexual maturation as a homosexual. But, as the book
Alexandria shrewdly shows, Forster finds his precursor culture in ancient
Alexandria; indeed he helps to teach us that we are all Alexandrians, inso-
far as we now live in a literary culture. Forster’s insight is massively sup-
ported by the historian F.E. Peters in the great study The Harvest of
Hellenism, when he catalogs our debts to the Eastern Hellenism of
Alexandria:

Its monuments are gnosticism, the university, the catechetical


school, pastoral poetry, monasticism, the romance, grammar, lex-
icography, city planning, theology, canon law, heresy, and scholas-
ticism.

Forster would have added, thinking of the Ptolemaic Alexandria of


331–30 B.C.E., that the most relevant legacy was an eclectic and tolerant
liberal humanism, scientific and scholarly, exalting the values of affection
over those of belief. That is already the vision of A Passage to India, and it
opens to the novel’s central spiritual question: how are the divine and the
human linked? In Alexandria, Forster presents us with a clue by his account
of the Arian heresy:
Novelists and Novels 255

Christ is the Son of God. Then is he not younger than God? Arius
held that he was and that there was a period before time began
when the First Person of the Trinity existed and the Second did
not. A typical Alexandrian theologian, occupied with the favourite
problem of linking human and divine, Arius thought to solve the
problem by making the link predominately human. He did not
deny the Godhead of Christ, but he did make him inferior to the
Father—of like substance, not of the same substance, which was
the view held by Athanasius, and stamped as orthodox by the
Council of Nicaea. Moreover the Arian Christ, like the Gnostic
Demiurge, made the world;—creation, an inferior activity, being
entrusted to him by the Father, who had Himself created nothing
but Christ.
It is easy to see why Arianism became popular. By making
Christ younger and lower than God it brought him nearer to us—
indeed it tended to level him into a mere good man and to fore-
stall Unitarianism. It appealed to the untheologically minded, to
emperors and even more to empresses. But St. Athanasius, who
viewed the innovation with an expert eye, saw that while it popu-
larised Christ it isolated God, and he fought it with vigour and
venom. His success has been described. It was condemned as
heretical in 325, and by the end of the century had been expelled
from orthodox Christendom. Of the theatre of this ancient strife
no trace remains at Alexandria; the church of St. Mark where
Arius was presbyter has vanished: so have the churches where
Athanasius thundered—St. Theonas and the Caesareum. Nor do
we know in which street Arius died of epilepsy. But the strife still
continues in the hearts of men, who always tend to magnify the
human in the divine, and it is probable that many an individual
Christian to-day is an Arian without knowing it.

To magnify the human in the divine is certainly Forster’s quest, and


appears to be his interpretation of Hinduism in A Passage to India:

Down in the sacred corridors, joy had seethed to jollity. It was


their duty to play various games to amuse the newly born God,
and to simulate his sports with the wanton dairymaids of
Brindaban. Butter played a prominent part in these. When the
cradle had been removed, the principal nobles of the state gath-
ered together for an innocent frolic. They removed their turbans,
and one put a lump of butter on his forehead, and waited for it to
256 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

slide down his nose into his mouth. Before it could arrive, anoth-
er stole up behind him, snatched the melting morsel, and swal-
lowed it himself. All laughed exultantly at discovering that the
divine sense of humour coincided with their own. “God is love!”
There is fun in heaven. God can play practical jokes upon
Himself, draw chairs away from beneath His own posteriors, set
His own turbans on fire, and steal His own petticoats when He
bathes. By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what
Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment. All spirit as
well as all matter must participate in salvation, and if practical
jokes are banned, the circle is incomplete. Having swallowed the
butter, they played another game which chanced to be graceful:
the fondling of Shri Krishna under the similitude of a child. A
pretty red and gold ball is thrown, and he who catches it chooses
a child from the crowd, raises it in his arms, and carries it round
to be caressed. All stroke the darling creature for the Creator’s
sake, and murmur happy words. The child is restored to his par-
ents, the ball thrown on, and another child becomes for a moment
the World’s desire. And the Lord bounds hither and thither
through the aisles, chance, and the sport of chance, irradiating lit-
tle mortals with His immortality.... When they had played this
long enough—and being exempt from boredom, they played it
again and again, they played it again and again—they took many
sticks and hit them together, whack smack, as though they fought
the Pandava wars, and threshed and churned with them, and later
on they hung from the roof of the temple, in a net, a great black
earthenware jar, which was painted here and there with red, and
wreathed with dried figs. Now came a rousing sport. Springing
up, they struck at the jar with their sticks. It cracked, broke, and a
mass of greasy rice and milk poured on to their faces. They ate
and smeared one another’s mouths and dived between each other’s
legs for what had been pashed upon the carpet. This way and that
spread the divine mess, until the line of schoolboys, who had
somewhat fended off the crowd, broke for their share. The corri-
dors, the courtyard, were filled with benign confusion. Also the
flies awoke and claimed their share of God’s bounty. There was no
quarrelling, owing to the nature of the gift, for blessed is the man
who confers it on another, he imitates God. And those “imita-
tions,” those “substitutions,” continued to flicker through the
assembly for many hours, awaking in each man, according to his
capacity, an emotion that he would not have had otherwise. No
Novelists and Novels 257

definite image survived; at the Birth it was questionable whether a


silver doll or a mud village, or a silk napkin, or an intangible spir-
it, or a pious resolution, had been born. Perhaps all these things!
Perhaps none! Perhaps all birth is an allegory! Still, it was the
main event of the religious year. It caused strange thoughts.
Covered with grease and dust, Professor Godbole had once more
developed the life of his spirit. He had, with increasing vividness,
again seen Mrs. Moore, and round her faintly clinging forms of
trouble. He was a Brahman, she Christian, but it made no differ-
ence, it made no difference whether she was a trick of his memo-
ry or a telepathic appeal. It was his duty, as it was his desire, to
place himself in the position of the God and to love her, and to
place himself in her position and to say to the God, “Come, come,
come, come.” This was all he could do. How inadequate! But each
according to his own capacities, and he knew that his own were
small. “One old Englishwoman and one little, little wasp,” he
thought, as he stepped out of the temple into the grey of a pour-
ing wet morning. “It does not seem much, still it is more than I
am myself.”

Professor Godbole’s epiphany, his linkage of Mrs. Moore’s receptivity


toward the wasp with his own receptivity toward Mrs. Moore, has been
much admired by critics, deservedly so. In this moment-of-moments,
Godbole receives Mrs. Moore into Forster’s own faithless faith: a religion
of love between equals, as opposed to Christianity, a religion of love
between the incommensurate Jehovah and his creatures. But though beau-
tifully executed, Forster’s vision of Godbole and Mrs. Moore is spiritually
a little too easy. Forster knew that, and the finest moment in A Passage to
India encompasses this knowing. It comes in a sublime juxtaposition, in the
crossing between the conclusion of part 2, “Caves,” and the beginning of
part 3, “Temple,” where Godbole is seen standing in the presence of God.
The brief and beautiful chapter 32 that concludes “Caves” returns Fielding
to a Western and Ruskinian vision of form in Venice:

Egypt was charming—a green strip of carpet and walking up and


down it four sorts of animals and one sort of man. Fielding’s busi-
ness took him there for a few days. He re-embarked at
Alexandria—bright blue sky, constant wind, clean low coastline, as
against the intricacies of Bombay. Crete welcomed him next with
the long snowy ridge of its mountains, and then came Venice. As
he landed on the piazzetta a cup of beauty was lifted to his lips,
258 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

and he drank with a sense of disloyalty. The buildings of Venice,


like the mountains of Crete and the fields of Egypt, stood in the
right place, whereas in poor India everything was placed wrong.
He had forgotten the beauty of form among idol temples and
lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty? Form
stammered here and there in a mosque, became rigid through
nervousness even, but oh these Italian churches! San Giorgio
standing on the island which could scarcely have risen from the
waves without it, the Salute holding the entrance of a canal which,
but for it, would not be the Grand Canal! In the old undergradu-
ate days he had wrapped himself up in the many-coloured blanket
of St. Mark’s, but something more precious than mosaics and mar-
bles was offered to him now: the harmony between the works of
man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has
escaped muddle, the spirit in a reasonable form, with flesh and
blood subsisting. Writing picture post-cards to his Indian friends,
he felt that all of them would miss the joys he experienced now,
the joys of form, and that this constituted a serious barrier. They
would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not its shape, and though
Venice was not Europe, it was part of the Mediterranean harmo-
ny. The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that
exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of
Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and
the southern exit leads to the strangest experience of all. Turning
his back on it yet again, he took the train northward, and tender
romantic fancies that he thought were dead for ever, flowered
when he saw the buttercups and daisies of June.

After the muddle of India, where “everything was placed wrong,”


Fielding learns again “the beauty of form.” Alexandria, like Venice, is part
of the Mediterranean harmony, the human norm, but India is the cosmos
of “the monstrous and extraordinary.” Fielding confronting the Venetian
churches has absolutely nothing in common with Professor Godbole con-
fronting the God Krishna at the opposite end of the same strip of carpet
upon which Godbole stands. Forster is too wise not to know that the pas-
sage to India is only a passage. A passage is a journey, or an occurrence
between two persons. Fielding and Aziz do not quite make the passage
together, do not exchange vows that bind. Perhaps that recognition of lim-
its is the ultimate beauty of form in A Passage to India.
N O V E L I S T S
Robert Musil

A N D
(1880–1942)

N O V E L S
The Man Without Qualities

ROBERT MUSIL’S LITERARY EMINENCE IS BEYOND DOUBT. BECAUSE OF THE


unfinished (and unfinishable) nature of his masterwork, The Man Without
Qualities, he cannot quite be placed in the company of Joyce and Proust and
Kafka, or even of Thomas Mann and William Faulkner, among the High
Modernists. His aesthetic splendor rivals that of Broch and Hofmannsthal,
hardly a second order except in comparison to Joyce and Proust, Kafka and
Beckett.
Proust and Kafka each loses by translation, rather more than Mann and
Broch do, but Musil loses most, despite the distinguished and devoted
efforts of Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. Musil’s language is as unique as
Paul Celan’s, and Musil’s styles (there are several, beautifully modulated)
never stay fixed. Burton Pike contributes an eloquent “Translator’s
Afterword” (pp. 1771–1774) to the 1995 American edition, in which he
aptly remarks that there is no author in English who could provide a model
for Musil’s fusion of sound and sense. It is unnerving that Musil is both
essayistic and a curious blend of Taoist-Sufi in his procedures. He also
combines an inward voicing with an outward panoply that verges upon
prose-poetry.
Musil’s actual precursor was the Shakespeare of Hamlet, where the rep-
resentation of thinking-in-language touches a limit in the Prince of
Denmark’s seven soliloquies that even Musil cannot attain. Ulrich is a
descendant of Hamlet, who haunts German literature as pervasively as he
does the Anglo-American tradition. Incest, termed by Shelley the most
poetical of circumstances, is deferred throughout Part III of the novel, and
evidently continues to be deferred in the sixty hundred and fifty pages from

259
260 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the Posthumous Papers that Pike translates. The consummation of


Ulrich’s and Agathe’s mutual passion would have been a kind of suicide,
probably followed by a literal double-suicide, the only way in which this
unfinishable novel could have been finished. Musil’s own death became the
circumstance that concluded what could not reach conclusion, the full
union of Agathe and Ulrich, a cosmological metaphor for the end of
Musil’s cultural would.
And yet the word “incest” is grossly imprecise for the love between
these extraordinary siblings. What after all is incest in a fictive work? In
Musil, the long-impending but unrealizable total relationship between
Agathe and Ulrich is the ultimate trope for the new kind of secular tran-
scendence that is the endless quest of The Man Without Qualities. Perhaps
it might have been an atonement or sacrifice to avert the death of
European culture, had the actual intercourse between brother and sister
taken place. Throughout Part III of the novel, and in the Posthumous
Papers, Musil manifests an uncanny precision in the dangerous conversa-
tions between brother and sister:

“And it’s not at all against nature for a child to be the object of
such feelings?” Agathe asked.
“What would be against nature would be a straight-out lustful
desire,” Ulrich replied. “But a person like that also drags the inno-
cent or, in any event, unready and helpless creature into actions
for which it is not destined. He must ignore the immaturity of the
developing mind and body, and play the game of his passion with
a mute and veiled opponent; no, he not only ignores whatever
would get in his way, but brutally sweeps it aside! That’s some-
thing quite different, with different consequences!”
“But perhaps a touch of the perniciousness of this ‘sweeping
aside’ is already contained in the ‘ignoring’?” Agathe objected.
She might have been jealous of her brother’s tissue of thoughts; at
any rate, she resisted. “I don’t see any great distinction in whether
one pays no attention to what might restrain one, or doesn’t feel
it!”
Ulrich countered: “You’re right and you’re not right. I really
just told the story because it’s a preliminary state of the love
between brother and sister.”
“Love between brother and sister?” Agathe asked, and pre-
tended to be astonished, as if she were hearing the term for the
first time; but she was digging her nails into Ulrich’s arm again,
and perhaps she did so too strongly, and her fingers trembled.
Novelists and Novels 261

Ulrich, feeling as if five small warm wounds had opened side by


side in his arm, suddenly said: “The person whose strongest stim-
ulation is associated with experiences each of which is, in some
way or other, impossible, isn’t interested in possible experiences.
It may be that imagination is a way of fleeing from life, a refuge
and a den of iniquity, as many maintain; I think that the story of
the little girl, as well as all the other examples we’ve talked about,
point not to an abnormality or a weakness but to a revulsion
against the world and a strong recalcitrance, an excessive and
overpassionate desire for love!” He forgot that Agathe could know
nothing of the other examples and equivocal comparisons with
which his thoughts had previously associated this kind of love; for
he now felt himself in the clear again and had overcome, for the
time being, the anesthetizing taste, the transformation into the
will-less and lifeless, that was part of his experience, so that the
automatic reference slipped inadvertently through a gap in his
thoughts.
From the Posthumous Papers, pp. 1399–1400,
translated by Burton Pike

As an instance of what is most original in Musil, this is both altogether typ-


ical yet also totally unique, the paradox that makes for what is greatest but
sometimes maddening about The Man Without Qualities. Some of the
details in this passage I myself find unforgettable: Ulrich’s brilliant evasion
of “against nature,” Agathe’s “digging her nails into Ulrich’s arm” so as to
intimate “five small warm wounds,” and Ulrich’s subtle equation of revul-
sion against “the world” and a totalizing “desires for love.” Is that world
nature, history, society or immemorial morality? Musil insists that his
reader decide that for herself.
N O V E L S
A N D

Virginia Woolf
N O V E L I S T S

(1882–1941)

IN MAY 1940, LESS THAN A YEAR BEFORE SHE DROWNED HERSELF, VIRGINIA
Woolf read a paper to the Worker’s Educational Association in Brighton.
We know it as the essay entitled “The Leaning Tower,” in which the
Shelleyan emblem of the lonely tower takes on more of a social than an
imaginative meaning. It is no longer the point of survey from which the
poet Athanase gazes down in pity at the dark estate of mankind, and so is
not an image of contemplative wisdom isolated from the mundane. Instead,
it is “the tower of middle-class birth and expensive education,” from which
the poetic generation of W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice stare sidelong
at society. Woolf does not say so, but we can surmise that she preferred
Shelley to Auden, while realizing that she herself dwelt in the leaning
tower, unlike Yeats, to whom the lonely tower remained an inevitable
metaphor for poetic stance.
It is proper that “The Leaning Tower,” as a speculation upon the
decline of a Romantic image into belatedness, should concern itself also
with the peculiarities of poetic influence:

Theories then are dangerous things. All the same we must risk
making one this afternoon since we are going to discuss modern
tendencies. Directly we speak of tendencies or movements we
commit ourselves to the belief that there is some force, influence,
outer pressure which is strong enough to stamp itself upon a whole
group of different writers so that all their writing has a certain
common likeness. We must then have a theory as to what this
influence is. But let us always remember—influences are infinitely
numerous; writers are infinitely sensitive; each writer has a differ-
ent sensibility. That is why literature is always changing, like the

262
Novelists and Novels 263

weather, like clouds in the sky. Read a page of Scott; then of


Henry James; try to work out the influences that have transformed
the one page into the other. It is beyond our skill. We can only
hope therefore to single out the most obvious influences that have
formed writers into groups. Yet there are groups. Books descend
from books as families descend from families. Some descend from
Jane Austen; others from Dickens. They resemble their parents, as
human children resemble their parents; yet they differ as children
differ, and revolt as children revolt. Perhaps it will be easier to
understand living writers as we take a quick look at some of their
forbears.

A critic of literary influence learns to be both enchanted and wary


when such a passage is encountered. Sensibility is indeed the issue, since
without “a different sensibility” no writer truly is a writer. Woolf ’s sensi-
bility essentially is Paterian, as Perry Meisel accurately demonstrated. She
is hardly unique among the great Modernist writers in owing much to
Pater. That group includes Wilde, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, as
well as Pound and Eliot. Among the novelists, the Paterians, however
involuntary, include Scott Fitzgerald, the early Joyce, and in strange ways
both Conrad and Lawrence, as well as Woolf. Of all these, Woolf is most
authentically Pater’s child. Her central tropes, like his, are personality and
death, and her ways of representing consciousness are very close to his.
The literary ancestor of those curious twin sensibilities—Septimus Smith
and Clarissa Dalloway—is Pater’s Sebastian Van Storck, except that Woolf
relents, and they do not go into Sebastian’s “formless and nameless infinite
world, quite evenly grey.”

Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the fourth of Woolf ’s nine novels, is her first
extraordinary achievement. Perhaps she should have called it The Hours, its
original working title. To speak of measuring one’s time by days or months,
rather than years, has urgency, and this urgency increases when the fiction
of duration embraces only hours, as Mrs. Dalloway does. The novel’s pecu-
liar virtue is the enigmatic doubling between Clarissa Dalloway and
Septimus Smith, who do not know one another. We are persuaded that the
book is not disjointed because Clarissa and Septimus uncannily share what
seem a single consciousness, intense and vulnerable, each fearing to be
consumed by a fire perpetually about to break forth. Woolf seems to cause
Septimus to die instead of Clarissa, almost as though the novel is a single
264 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

apotropaic gesture on its author’s part. One thinks of the death died for
Marius by Cornelius in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, but that is one friend
atoning for another. However unified, does Mrs. Dalloway cogently link
Clarissa and Septimus?
Clearly the book does, but only through its manipulation of Parer’s
evasions of the figure or trope of the self as the center of a flux of sensa-
tions. In a book review written when she was only twenty-five, Woolf made
a rough statement of the stance towards the self she would take through-
out her work-to-come, in the form of a Paterian rhetorical question: “Are
we not each in truth the centre of innumerable rays which so strike upon
one figure only, and is it not our business to flash them straight and com-
pletely back again, and never suffer a single shaft to blunt itself on the far
side of us?” Here is Clarissa Dalloway, at the novel’s crucial epiphany, not
suffering the rays to blunt themselves on the far side of her:

What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A


young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—
the Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself—but how?
Always her body went through it first, when she was told, sud-
denly, of an accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had
thrown himself from a window. Up had flashed the ground;
through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There
he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation
of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? And the
Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never any-
thing more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she
would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept
on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of
Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mat-
tered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in
her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This
he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to
communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the
centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rap-
ture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

The evasiveness of the center is defied by the act of suicide, which in


Woolf is a communication and not, as it is in Freud, a murder. Earlier,
Septimus had been terrified by a “gradual drawing together of everything
to one centre before his eyes.” The doubling of Clarissa and Septimus
Novelists and Novels 265

implies that there is only a difference in degree, not in kind, between


Clarissa’s sensibility and the naked consciousness or “madness” of
Septimus. Neither needs the encouragement of “Fear no more the heat o’
the sun,” because each knows that consciousness is isolation and so
untruth, and that the right worship of life is to defy that isolation by dying.
J. Hillis Miller remarks that: “A novel, for Woolf, is the place of death
made visible.” It seems to me difficult to defend Mrs. Dalloway from moral
judgments that call Woolf ’s stance wholly nihilistic. But then, Mrs.
Dalloway, remarkable as it is, is truly Woolf ’s starting-point as a strong
writer, and not her conclusion.

To the Lighthouse

Critics tend to agree that Woolf ’s finest novel is To the Lighthouse (1927),
which is certainly one of the central works of the modern imagination,
comparable to Lawrence’s The Rainbow or Conrad’s Victory, if not quite of
the range of Women in Love or Nostromo. Perhaps it is the only novel in
which Woolf displays all of her gifts at once. Erich Auerbach, in his
Mimesis, lucidly summing up Woolf ’s achievement in her book, could be
expounding Pater’s trope of the privileged moment:

What takes place here in Virginia Woolf ’s novel is ... to put the
emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the serv-
ice of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the
process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than
the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which
we surrender ourselves without prejudice. To be sure, what hap-
pens in that moment—be it outer or inner processes—concerns in
a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and
for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in
general have in common. It is precisely the random moment
which is comparatively independent of the controversial and
unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaf-
fected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the
elementary things which our lives have in common come to light.
The more numerous, varied, and simple the people are who
appear as subjects of such random moments, the more effectively
must what they have in common shine forth.

The shining forth is precisely Pater’s secularization of the epiphany, in


which random moments are transformed: “A sudden light transfigures a
266 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the


barn door; a moment—and the thing has vanished, because it was pure
effect.” Woolf, like Pater sets herself “to realize this situation, to define, in
a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in themselves pale and
impotent, unite and begin to burn ...” To realize such a situation is to set
oneself against the vision of Mr. Ramsay (Woolf ’s father, the philosopher
Leslie Stephen), which expresses itself in the grimly empiricist maxim that:
“The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
Against this can be set Lily Briscoe’s vision, which concludes the novel:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she


turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its
greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at
something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would
be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking
up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she
looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if
she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre.
It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her
brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

“An attempt at something” postulates, for Woolf, a center, however


evasive. The apotheosis of aesthetic or perceptive principle here is Woolf ’s
beautifully poised and precarious approach to an affirmation of the diffi-
cult possibility of meaning. The Waves (1931) is a large-scale equivalent of
Lily Briscoe’s painting. Bernard, the most comprehensive of the novel’s six
first-person narrators, ends the book with a restrained exultation, pro-
foundly representative of Woolf ’s feminization of the Paterian aesthetic
stance:

“Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilisation


is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whale-bone. But there is
a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a
stir of some sort—sparrows on plain trees somewhere chirping.
There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What
is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street look-
ing up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening
of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday;
another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another gen-
eral awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The
bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist
Novelists and Novels 267

thickens on the field. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the


pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps.
Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renew-
al, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.
“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am
aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me
like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him
back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you
whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It
is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with
my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man’s, like
Percival’s, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse.
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O
Death!”
The waves broke on the shore.

“Incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again,” though ascribed to
Bernard, has in it the fine pathos of a recognition of natural harshness that
does not come often to a male consciousness. And for all the warlike
imagery, the ride against death transcends aggressivity, whether against the
self or against others. Pater had insisted that our one choice lies in pack-
ing as many pulsations of the artery, or Blakean visions of the poet’s work,
into our interval as possible. Woolf subtly hints that even Pater succumbs
to a male illusion of experiential quantity, rather than to a female recogni-
tion of gradations in the quality of possible experience. A male critic might
want to murmur, in defense of Pater, that male blindness of the void with-
in experience is very difficult to overcome, and that Pater’s exquisite sensi-
bility is hardly male, whatever the accident of his gender.
Between the Acts (1941), Woolf ’s final novel, can be read as a covert and
witty subversion of late Shakespeare, whose romances Woolf attempts to
expose as being perhaps more male than universal in some of their impli-
cations. Parodying Shakespeare is a dangerous mode; the flat-out farce of
Max Beerbohm and Nigel Dennis works more easily than Woolf ’s allusive
deftness, but Woolf is not interested in the crudities of farce. Between the
Acts is her deferred fulfillment of the polemical program set forth in her
marvelous polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929), which is still the most per-
suasive of all feminist literary manifestos. To me the most powerful and
unnerving stroke in that book is in its trope for the enclosure that men
have forced upon women:

For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by
268 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force,
which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mor-
tar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and busi-
ness and politics. But this creative power differs greatly from the
creative power of man ....

That last assertion is becoming a kind of shibboleth in contemporary


feminist literary criticism. Whether George Eliot and Henry James ought
to be read as instances of a gender-based difference in creative power is not
beyond all critical dispute. Is Dorothea Brooke more clearly the product of
a woman’s creative power than Isabel Archer would be? Could we neces-
sarily know that Clarissa Harlowe ensues from a male imagination? Woolf,
at the least, lent her authority to provoking such questions. That authori-
ty, earned by novels of the splendour of To the Lighthouse and Between the
Acts, becomes more formidable as the years pass.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
James Joyce
(1882–1941)

N O V E L S
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

THE LATE SIR WILLIAM EMPSON, IN AN ESSAY ON “JOYCE’S INTENTIONS,”


sought to rescue Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the
school of Christianizing critics, called for short by Empson “the Kenner
Smear.” Though the Kenner Smear essentially baptizes Joyce’s writings
(following the lead of T.S. Eliot, who found Joyce eminently orthodox), it
also deprecates the representation of Stephen, particularly in the Portrait,
as Empson protested:

One or two minor points need fitting in here. It is part of Kenner’s


argument, to prove that Stephen is already damned, that he is
made to expound the wrong aesthetic philosophy. Joyce was letting
him get the theory right in Stephen Hero, but when he rewrote and
concentrated the material as the Portrait Stephen was turned into
a sentimental neo-Platonist; that is, he considered the artist supe-
rior to earthly details, instead of letting the artist deduce realism
from Aquinas. If we actually did find this alteration, I agree that
the argument would carry some weight, though the evidence
would need to he very strong. But, so far as I can see, there is only
one definite bit of evidence offered, that Joyce in rewriting left out
the technical term ‘epiphany’, invented by himself to describe the
moment of insight which sums up a whole situation. I can tell you
why he left it out; because he was not always too egotistical to
write well. Even he, during revision, could observe that it was tire-
some to have Stephen spouting to his young friends about this
invented term. But I find no change in doctrine; he still firmly

269
270 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

rejects “Idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from


some other world, the idea of which the matter was but the shad-
ow,” and explains that the ‘claritas’ of Aquinas comes when the
image “is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been
arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony.” This is
surely the doctrine which Kenner approves, and we next have as
clear a pointer from the novelist as he ever allows us: “Stephen
paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his
words had called up around them a thought enchanted silence.” A
critic who can believe that Joyce wrote this whole passage in order
to jeer at it has, I submit, himself taken some fatal turning, or
slipped unawares over the edge of some vast drop.

I am happy to agree with Empson against Hugh Kenner on this, but I


myself find Aquinas a surrogate here for Joyce’s ghostly aesthetic father,
Walter Pater, actual inventor of Stephen Hero’s “epiphanies” and so of a
mode of intellectual vision that dominates the Portrait, remains crucial in
Ulysses, but largely subsides in Finnegans Wake.
Pater founded his criticism upon perception and sensation, the per-
ception of privileged moments of vision, and the sensation of the intensity
and brevity of those epiphanies, sudden manifestations or shinings forth of
power, order, beauty or of a transcendental or sublime experience fading
into the continuum of the commonplace. Like Joyce after him, Pater asked
very little of these epiphanies, far less than Wordsworth or Ruskin had
asked, let alone the eminently orthodox, from Gerard Manley Hopkins
(Pater’s student at Oxford) through T.S. Eliot and his New Critical fol-
lowers, against whom Empson fought his anticlerical campaigns. The
essential formula for Stephen’s epiphanies in the Portrait is set forth in
Pater’s study of the Renaissance:

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a wind-


mill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment—and
the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a
relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

Himself an Epicurean and so a metaphysical materialist, Pater’s


achievement was to remove from the epiphany its theological and idealis-
tic colorings. Joyce, certainly not a Catholic believer, accepts the epiphany
from Pater as a secular and naturalistic phenomenon, purged of its
Wordsworthian and Ruskinian moralizings. The Joycean epiphany is still
“a sudden spiritual manifestation” in which an object’s “whatness” or
Novelists and Novels 271

“soul” can be seen as leaping “to us from the vestment of its appearance.”
But that is spiritual only in the Epicurean sense, in which the “what” is
unknowable anyway, and Joyce is no more Christian than Whitman is in
Song of Myself when the child asks him what the grass is, or than Stevens is
in his apprehension of sudden radiances.
Just before the close of the Portrait, Stephen records a vision that is an
epitome of epiphanies in a passage both Ovidian and Paterian:

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their prom-
ise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand
against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out
to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are
your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call
to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of
their exultant and terrible youth.

The flight of Icarus and his fall are assimilated to the Paterian sense of
belatedness, of coming at the end of a long and high tradition of Romantic
vision. Joyce, like Pater, longs for a renaissance, for a rebirth into the com-
pany of exiles to worldliness who found another country in the strongest
imaginative literature. Ovid, who knew the bitterness of exile, prefigured
Dante in at least that regard, and there is a Dantesque quality to Stephen’s
epiphany here. That hovering company of visionaries is pervaded with the
auras of solitude and of departure, and their exultant youth may yield to
the terrible fate of Icarus. If this epiphany’s eroticism is palpable and plan-
gent, its darker reverberations intimate deathliness as the price of the free-
dom of art. Echoes of Ibsen and Blake combine in Stephen’s famous penul-
timate declaration:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the real-


ity of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the untreat-
ed conscience of my race.

“Forge” is a blacksmith’s term in this context, and not a penman’s. The


very name of Ibsen’s Brand suggests the heat that can forge what Ibsen’s
protagonist calls “the untreated soul of man,” and we can remember also
Blake’s Los at the smithy, hammering out the engraved plates of his vision.
Again one votes for Empson, against Kenner, as to the high seriousness of
Stephen’s aspirations and the aesthetic dignity with which Joyce chose to
invest them.
N O V E L S
A N D

Franz Kafka
N O V E L I S T S

(1883–1924)

IN HER OBITUARY FOR HER LOVER, FRANZ KAFKA, MILENA JESENSKÁ


sketched a modern Gnostic, a writer whose vision was of the kenoma, the
cosmic emptiness into which we have been thrown:

He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened by life.... He


saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail and
destroy defenseless man.... All his works describe the terror of
mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings.

Milena—brilliant, fearless, and loving—may have subtly distorted


Kafka’s beautifully evasive slidings between normative Jewish and Jewish
Gnostic stances. Max Brod, responding to Kafka’s now-famous remark—
“We are nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head”—explained to his
friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sin-
ful and evil. “No,” Kafka replied, “I believe we are not such a radical relapse
of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day.” Playing straight
man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cos-
mos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly said: “Plenty of hope—for God—no
end of hope—only not for us.”
Kafka, despite Gershom Scholem’s authoritative attempts to claim him
for Jewish Gnosticism, is both more and less than a Gnostic, as we might
expect. Yahweh can be saved, and the divine degradation that is fundamen-
tal to Gnosticism is not an element in Kafka’s world. But we were fashioned
out of the clay during one of Yahweh’s bad moods; perhaps there was divine
dyspepsia, or sultry weather in the garden that Yahweh had planted in the

272
Novelists and Novels 273

East. Yahweh is hope, and we are hopeless. We are the jackdaws or crows,
the kafkas (since that is what the name means, in Czech) whose impossi-
bility is what the heavens signify: “The crows maintain that a single crow
could destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing
against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of
crows.”
In Gnosticism, there is an alien, wholly transcendent God, and the
adept, after considerable difficulties, can find the way back to presence and
fullness. Gnosticism therefore is a religion of salvation, though the most
negative of all such saving visions. Kafkan spirituality offers no hope of sal-
vation, and so is not Gnostic. But Milena Jesenská certainly was right to
emphasize the Kafkan terror that is akin to Gnosticism’s dread of the keno-
ma, which is the world governed by the Archons. Kafka takes the impossi-
ble step beyond Gnosticism, by denying that there is hope for us anywhere
at all.
In the aphorisms that Brod rather misleadingly entitled “Reflections
on Sin, Pain, Hope and The True Way,” Kafka wrote: “What is laid upon
us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.” How much
Kabbalah Kafka knew is not clear. Since he wrote a new Kabbalah, the
question of Jewish Gnostic sources can be set aside. Indeed, by what seems
a charming oddity (but I would call it yet another instance of Blake’s insis-
tence that forms of worship are chosen from poetic tales), our understand-
ing of Kabbalah is Kafkan anyway, since Kafka profoundly influenced
Gershom Scholem, and no one will be able to get beyond Scholem’s cre-
ative or strong misreading of Kabbalah for decades to come. I repeat this
point to emphasize its shock value: we read Kabbalah, via Scholem, from a
Kafkan perspective, even as we read human personality and its mimetic
possibilities by way of Shakespeare’s perspectives, since essentially Freud
mediates Shakespeare for us, yet relies upon him nevertheless. A Kafkan
facticity or contingency now governs our awareness of whatever in Jewish
cultural tradition is other than normative.
In his diaries for 1922, Kafka meditated, on January 16, upon “some-
thing very like a breakdown,” in which it was “impossible to sleep, impos-
sible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course
of life.” The vessels were breaking for him as his demoniac, writerly inner
world and the outer life “split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash
in a fearful manner.” Late in the evening, K. arrives at the village, which is
deep in snow. The Castle is in front of him, but even the hill upon which
it stands is veiled in mist and darkness, and there is not a single light visi-
ble to show that the Castle was there. K. stands a long time on a wooden
bridge that leads from the main road to the village, while gazing, not at the
274 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

village, but “into the illusory emptiness above him,” where the Castle
should be. He does not know what he will always refuse to learn, which is
that the emptiness is “illusory” in every possible sense, since he does gaze
at the kenoma, which resulted initially from the breaking of the vessels, the
splitting apart of every world, inner and outer.
Writing the vision of K., Kafka counts the costs of his confirmation, in
a passage prophetic of Scholem, but with a difference that Scholem sought
to negate by combining Zionism and Kabbalah for himself. Kafka knew
better, perhaps only for himself, but perhaps for others as well:

Second: This pursuit, originating in the midst of men, carries one


in a direction away from them. The solitude that for the most part
has been forced on me, in part voluntarily sought by me—but
what was this if not compulsion too?—is now losing all its ambi-
guity and approaches its denouement. Where is it leading? The
strongest likelihood is that it may lead to madness; there is noth-
ing more to say, the pursuit goes right through me and rends me
asunder. Or I can—can I?—manage to keep my feet somewhat
and be carried along in the wild pursuit. Where, then, shall I be
brought? “Pursuit,” indeed, is only a metaphor. I can also say,
“assault on the last earthly frontier,” an assault, moreover,
launched from below, from mankind, and since this too is a
metaphor, I can replace it by the metaphor of an assault from
above, aimed at me from above.
All such writing is an assault on the frontiers; if Zionism had
not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret
doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are intimations of this. Though of
course it would require genius of an unimaginable kind to strike
root again in the old centuries, or create the old centuries anew
and not spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth.

Consider Kafka’s three metaphors, which he so knowingly substitutes


for one another. The pursuit is of ideas, in that mode of introspection
which is Kafka’s writing. Yet this metaphor of pursuit is also a piercing
“right through me” and a breaking apart of the self. For “pursuit,” Kafka
then substitutes mankind’s assault, from below, on the last earthly frontier.
What is that frontier? It must lie between us and the heavens. Kafka, the
crow or jackdaw, by writing, transgresses the frontier and implicitly main-
tains that he could destroy the heavens. By another substitution, the
metaphor changes to “an assault from above, aimed at me from above,” the
aim simply being the signifying function of the heavens, which is to mean
Novelists and Novels 275

the impossibility of Kafkas or crows. The heavens assault Kafka through his
writing; “all such writing is an assault on the frontiers,” and these must now
be Kafka’s own frontiers. One thinks of Freud’s most complex “frontier
concept,” more complex even than the drive: the bodily ego. The heavens
assault Kafka’s bodily ego, but only through his own writing. Certainly such
an assault is not un-Jewish, and has as much to do with normative as with
esoteric Jewish tradition.
Yet, according to Kafka, his own writing, were it not for the interven-
tion of Zionism, might easily have developed into a new Kabbalah. How
are we to understand that curious statement about Zionism as the block-
ing agent that prevents Franz Kafka from becoming another Isaac Luria?
Kafka darkly and immodestly writes: “There are intimations of this.” Our
teacher Gershom Scholem governs our interpretation here, of necessity.
Those intimations belong to Kafka alone, or perhaps to a select few in his
immediate circle. They cannot be conveyed to Jewry, even to its elite,
because Zionism has taken the place of messianic Kabbalah, including pre-
sumably the heretical Kabbalah of Nathan of Gaza, prophet of Sabbatai
Zvi and of all his followers down to the blasphemous Jacob Frank. Kafka’s
influence upon Scholem is decisive here, for Kafka already has arrived at
Scholem’s central thesis of the link between the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria,
the messianism of the Sabbatarians and Frankists, and the political
Zionism that gave rebirth to Israel.
Kafka goes on, most remarkably, to disown the idea that he possesses
“genius of an unimaginable kind,” one that either would strike root again
in archaic Judaism, presumably of the esoteric sort, or more astonishingly
“create the old centuries anew,” which Scholem insisted Kafka had done.
But can we speak, as Scholem tried to speak, of the Kabbalah of Franz
Kafka? Is there a new secret doctrine in the superb stories and the extraor-
dinary parables and paradoxes, or did not Kafka spend his genius in the act
of new creation of the old Jewish centuries? Kafka certainly would have
judged himself harshly as one spent withal, rather than as a writer who
“only then began to flower forth.” Kafka died only two and a half years
after this meditative moment, died, alas, just before his forty-first birthday.
Yet as the propounder of a new Kabbalah, he had gone very probably as far
as he (or anyone else) could go. No Kabbalah, be it that of Moses de Leon,
Isaac Luria, Moses Cordovero, Nathan of Gaza or Gershom Scholem, is
exactly easy to interpret, but Kafka’s secret doctrine, if it exists at all, is
designedly uninterpretable. My working principle in reading Kafka is to
observe that he did everything possible to evade interpretation, which only
means that what most needs and demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing
is its perversely deliberate evasion of interpretation. Erich Heller’s
276 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

formula for getting at this evasion is: “Ambiguity has never been consid-
ered an elemental force; it is precisely this in the stories of Franz Kafka.”
Perhaps, but evasiveness is not the same literary quality as ambiguity.
Evasiveness is purposive; it writes between the lines, to borrow a fine
trope from Leo Strauss. What does it mean when a quester for a new
Negative, or perhaps rather a revisionist of an old Negative, resorts to the
evasion of every possible interpretation as his central topic or theme? Kafka
does not doubt guilt, but wishes to make it “possible for men to enjoy sin
without guilt, almost without guilt,” by reading Kafka. To enjoy sin almost
without guilt is to evade interpretation, in exactly the dominant Jewish
sense of interpretation. Jewish tradition, whether normative or esoteric,
never teaches you to ask Nietzsche’s question: “Who is the interpreter, and
what power does he seek to gain over the text?” Instead, Jewish tradition
asks: “Is the interpreter in the line of those who seek to build a hedge about
the Torah in every age?” Kafka’s power of evasiveness is not a power over
his own text, and it does build a hedge about the Torah in our age. Yet no
one before Kafka built up that hedge wholly out of evasiveness, not even
Maimonides or Judah Halevi or even Spinoza. Subtlest and most evasive of
all writers, Kafka remains the severest and most harassing of the belated
sages of what will yet become the Jewish cultural tradition of the future.

II

The jackdaw or crow or Kafka is also the weird figure of the great
hunter Gracchus (whose Latin name also means a crow), who is not alive
but dead, yet who floats, like one living, on his death-bark forever. When
the fussy Burgomaster of Riva knits his brow, asking: “And you have no
part in the other world (das Jenseits)?”, the Hunter replies, with grand
defensive irony:

I am forever on the great stair that leads up to it. On that infinitely


wide and spacious stair I clamber about, sometimes up, sometimes
down, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, always in
motion. The Hunter has been turned into a butterfly. Do not laugh.

Like the Burgomaster, we do not laugh. Being a single crow, Gracchus


would be enough to destroy the heavens, but he will never get there.
Instead, the heavens signify his impossibility, the absence of crows or
hunters, and so he has been turned into another butterfly, which is all we
can be, from the perspective of the heavens. And we bear no blame for that:
Novelists and Novels 277

“I had been glad to live and I was glad to die. Before I stepped
aboard, I joyfully flung away my wretched load of ammunition,
my knapsack, my hunting rifle that I had always been proud to
carry, and I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her mar-
riage dress. I lay and waited. Then came the mishap.”
“A terrible fate,” said the Burgomaster, raising his hand defen-
sively. “And you bear no blame for it?”
“None,” said the hunter. “I was a hunter; was there any sin in
that? I followed my calling as a hunter in the Black Forest, where
there were still wolves in those days. I lay in ambush, shot, hit my
mark, flayed the skin from my victims: was there any sin in that?
My labors were blessed. ‘The Great Hunter of Black Forest’ was
the name I was given. Was there any sin in that?”
“I am not called upon to decide that,” said the Burgomaster,
“but to me also there seems to be no sin in such things. But then,
whose is the guilt?”
“The boatman’s,” said the Hunter. “Nobody will read what I say
here, no one will come to help me; even if all the people were
commanded to help me, every door and window would remain
shut, everybody would take to bed and draw the bedclothes over
his head, the whole earth would become an inn for the night. And
there is sense in that, for nobody knows of me, and if anyone knew
he would not know where I could be found, and if he knew where
I could be found, he would not know how to deal with me, he
would not know how to help me. The thought of helping me is an
illness that has to be cured by taking to one’s bed.”

How admirable Gracchus is, even when compared to the Homeric


heroes! They know, or think they know, that to be alive, however miser-
able, is preferable to being the foremost among the dead. But Gracchus
wished only to be himself, happy to be a hunter when alive, joyful to be a
corpse when dead: “I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her
marriage dress.” So long as everything happened in good order, Gracchus
was more than content. The guilt must be the boatman’s, and may not
exceed mere incompetence. Being dead and yet still articulate, Gracchus is
beyond help: “The thought of helping me is an illness that has to be cured
by taking to one’s bed.”
When he gives the striking trope of the whole earth closing down like
an inn for the night, with the bedclothes drawn over everybody’s head,
Gracchus renders the judgment: “And there is sense in that.” There is
sense in that only because in Kafka’s world as in Freud’s, or in Scholem’s,
278 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

or in any world deeply informed by Jewish memory, there is necessarily


sense in everything, total sense, even though Kafka refuses to aid you in
getting at or close to it.
But what kind of a world is that, where there is sense in everything,
where everything seems to demand interpretation? There can be sense in
everything, as J.H. Van den Berg once wrote against Freud’s theory of
repression, only if everything is already in the past and there never again
can be anything wholly new. That is certainly the world of the great nor-
mative rabbis of the second century of the Common Era, and consequent-
ly it has been the world of most Jews ever since. Torah has been given,
Talmud has risen to complement and interpret it, other interpretations in
the chain of tradition are freshly forged in each generation, but the limits
of Creation and of Revelation are fixed in Jewish memory. There is sense
in everything because all sense is present already in the Hebrew Bible,
which by definition must be totally intelligible, even if its fullest intelligi-
bility will not shine forth until the Messiah comes.
Gracchus, hunter and jackdaw, is Kafka, pursuer of ideas and jackdaw,
and the endless, hopeless voyage of Gracchus is Kafka’s passage, only part-
ly through a language not his own, and largely through a life not much his
own. Kafka was studying Hebrew intensively while he wrote “The Hunter
Gracchus,” early in 1917, and I think we may call the voyages of the dead
but never-buried Gracchus a trope for Kafka’s belated study of his ances-
tral language. He was still studying Hebrew in the spring of 1923, with his
tuberculosis well advanced, and down to nearly the end he longed for Zion,
dreaming of recovering his health and firmly grounding his identity by
journeying to Palestine. Like Gracchus, he experienced life-in-death,
though unlike Gracchus he achieved the release of total death.
“The Hunter Gracchus” as a story or extended parable is not the nar-
rative of a Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman, because Kafka’s trope for
his writing activity is not so much a wandering or even a wavering, but
rather a repetition, labyrinthine and burrow-building. His writing repeats,
not itself, but a Jewish esoteric interpretation of Torah that Kafka himself
scarcely knows, or even needs to know. What this interpretation tells Kafka
is that there is no written Torah but only an oral one. However, Kafka has
no one to tell him what this Oral Torah is. He substitutes his own writing
therefore for the Oral Torah not made available to him. He is precisely in
the stance of the Hunter Gracchus, who concludes by saying, “ ‘ I am here,
more than that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has
no rudder, and it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions
of death.’ ”
Novelists and Novels 279

III

“What is the Talmud if not a message from the distance?”, Kafka


wrote to Robert Klopstock, on December 19, 1932. What was all of Jewish
tradition, to Kafka, except a message from an endless distance? That is
surely part of the burden of the famous parable, “An Imperial Message,”
which concludes with you, the reader, sitting at your window when
evening falls and dreaming to yourself the parable—that God, in his act of
dying, has sent you an individual message. Heinz Politzer read this as a
Nietzschean parable, and so fell into the trap set by the Kafkan evasiveness:

Describing the fate of the parable in a time depleted of metaphys-


ical truths, the imperial message has turned into the subjective
fantasy of a dreamer who sits at a window with a view on a dark-
ening world. The only real information imported by this story is
the news of the Emperor’s death. This news Kafka took over from
Nietzsche.

No, for even though you dream the parable, the parable conveys truth.
The Talmud does exist; it really is an Imperial message from the distance.
The distance is too great; it cannot reach you; there is hope, but not for
you. Nor is it so clear that God is dead. He is always dying, yet always
whispers a message into the angel’s ear. It is said to you that: “Nobody
could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man,”
but the Emperor actually does not die in the text of the parable.
Distance is part of Kafka’s crucial notion of the Negative, which is not
a Hegelian nor a Heideggerian Negative, but is very close to Freud’s
Negation and also to the Negative imaging carried out by Scholem’s
Kabbalists. But I want to postpone Kafka’s Jewish version of the Negative
until later. “The Hunter Gracchus” is an extraordinary text, but it is not
wholly characteristic of Kafka at his strongest, at his uncanniest or most
sublime.
When he is most himself, Kafka gives us a continuous inventiveness
and originality that rivals Dante, and truly challenges Proust and Joyce as
that of the dominant Western author of our century, setting Freud aside,
since Freud ostensibly is science and not narrative or mythmaking, though
if you believe that, then you can be persuaded of anything. Kafka’s beast
fables are rightly celebrated, but his most remarkable fabulistic being is
neither animal nor human, but is little Odradek, in the curious sketch, less
than a page and a half long, “The Cares of a Family Man,” where the title
might have been translated: “The Sorrows of a Paterfamilias.” The family
280 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

man narrates these five paragraphs, each a dialectical lyric in itself, begin-
ning with one that worries the meaning of the name:

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to


account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of
German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of
both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither
is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent
meaning of the word.

This evasiveness was overcome by the scholar Wilhelm Emrich, who


traced the name Odradek to the Czech word odraditi, meaning to dissuade
anyone from doing anything. Like Edward Gorey’s Doubtful Guest,
Odradek is uninvited yet will not leave, since implicitly he dissuades you
from doing anything about his presence, or rather something about his
very uncanniness advises you to let him alone:

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there


were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a
flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have
thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off
bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied
sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden
crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod
is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one
side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing
can stand upright as if on two legs.

Is Odradek a “thing,” as the bemused family man begins by calling him,


or is he not a childlike creature, a daemon at home in the world of children?
Odradek clearly was made by an inventive and humorous child, rather in
the spirit of the making of Adam out of the moistened red clay by the J
writer’s Yahweh. It is difficult not to read Odradek’s creation as a deliberate
parody when we are told that “the whole thing can stand upright as if on
two legs,” and again when the suggestion is ventured that Odradek, like
Adam, “once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-
down remnant.” If Odradek is fallen, he is still quite jaunty, and cannot be
closely scrutinized, since he “is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid
hold of,” like the story in which he appears. Odradek not only advises you
not to do anything about him, but in some clear sense he is yet another fig-
ure by means of whom Kafka advises you against interpreting Kafka.
Novelists and Novels 281

One of the loveliest moments in all of Kafka comes when you, the
paterfamilias, encounter Odradek leaning directly beneath you against the
banisters. Being inclined to speak to him, as you would to a child, you
receive a surprise: “ ‘ Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he
says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it
is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather
like the rustling of fallen leaves.”
“The ‘I’ is another,” Rimbaud once wrote, adding: “So much the
worse for the wood that finds it is a violin.” So much the worse for the
wood that finds it is Odradek. He laughs at being a vagrant, if only by the
bourgeois definition of having “no fixed abode,” but the laughter, not
being human, is uncanny. And so he provokes the family man to an uncan-
ny reflection, which may be a Kafkan parody of Freud’s death drive beyond
the pleasure principle:

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he


possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life,
some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply
to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling
down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before
the feet of my children? He does no harm to anyone that I can see,
but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

The aim of life, Freud says, is death, is the return of the organic to the
inorganic, supposedly our earlier state of being. Our activity wears out, and
so we die because, in an uncanny sense, we wish to die. But Odradek,
harmless and charming, is a child’s creation, aimless, and so not subject to
the death drive. Odradek is immortal, being daemonic, and he represents
also a Freudian return of the repressed, of something repressed in the
paterfamilias, something from which the family man is in perpetual flight.
Little Odradek is precisely what Freud calls a cognitive return of the
repressed, while (even as) a complete affective repression is maintained.
The family man introjects Odradek intellectually, but totally projects him
affectively. Odradek, I now suggest, is best understood as Kafka’s synec-
doche for Verneinung; Kafka’s version (not altogether un-Freudian) of
Jewish Negation, a version I hope to adumbrate in what follows.

IV

Why does Kafka have so unique a spiritual authority? Perhaps the ques-
tion should be rephrased. What kind of spiritual authority does Kafka have
282 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

for us or why are we moved or compelled to read him as one who has such
authority? Why invoke the question of authority at all? Literary authority,
however we define it, has no necessary relation to spiritual authority, and to
speak of a spiritual authority in Jewish writing anyway always has been to
speak rather dubiously. Authority is not a Jewish concept but a Roman one,
and so makes perfect contemporary sense in the context of the Roman
Catholic Church, but little sense in Jewish matters, despite the squalors of
Israeli politics and the flaccid pieties of American Jewish nostalgias. There is
no authority without hierarchy, and hierarchy is not a very Jewish concept
either. We do not want the rabbis, or anyone else, to tell us what or who is
or is not Jewish. The masks of the normative conceal not only the eclecti-
cism of Judaism and of Jewish culture, but also the nature of the J writer’s
Yahweh himself. It is absurd to think of Yahweh as having mere authority. He
is no Roman godling who augments human activities, nor a Homeric god
helping to constitute an audience for human heroism.
Yahweh is neither a founder nor an onlooker, though sometimes he
can be mistaken for either or both. His essential trope is fatherhood rather
than foundation, and his interventions are those of a covenanter rather
than of a spectator. You cannot found an authority upon him, because his
benignity is manifested not through augmentation but through creation.
He does not write; he speaks, and he is heard, in time, and what he con-
tinues to create by his speaking is olam, time without boundaries, which is
more than just an augmentation. More of anything else can come through
authority, but more life is the blessing itself, and comes, beyond authority,
to Abraham, to Jacob, and to David. No more than Yahweh, do any of
them have mere authority. Yet Kafka certainly does have literary authority,
and in a troubled way his literary authority is now spiritual also, particu-
larly in Jewish contexts. I do not think that this is a post-Holocaust phe-
nomenon, though Jewish Gnosticism, oxymoronic as it may or may not be,
certainly seems appropriate to our time, to many among us. Literary
Gnosticism does not seem to me a time-bound phenomenon, anyway.
Kafka’s The Castle, as Erich Heller has argued, is clearly more Gnostic than
normative in is spiritual temper, but then so is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and
Blake’s The Four Zoas, and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. We sense a Jewish ele-
ment in Kafka’s apparent Gnosticism, even if we are less prepared than
Scholem was to name it as a new Kabbalah. In his 1922 Diaries, Kafka sub-
tly insinuated that even his espousal of the Negative was dialectical:

The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot suffice, as in


my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For if I have gone the tini-
est step upward, won any, be it the most dubious kind of security for
Novelists and Novels 283

myself, I then stretch out on my step and wait for the Negative,
not to climb up to me, indeed, but to drag me down from it.
Hence it is a defensive instinct in me that won’t tolerate my hav-
ing the slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the marriage
bed, for example, even before it has been set up.

What is the Kafkan Negative, whether in this passage or elsewhere? Let


us begin by dismissing the Gallic notion that there is anything Hegelian
about it, any more than there is anything Hegelian about the Freudian
Verneinung. Kafka’s Negative, unlike Freud’s, is uneasily and remotely
descended from the ancient tradition of negative theology, and perhaps even
from that most negative of ancient theologies, Gnosticism, and yet Kafka,
despite his yearnings for transcendence, joins Freud in accepting the ulti-
mate authority of the fact. The given suffers no destruction in Kafka or in
Freud, and this given essentially is the way things are, for everyone, and for
the Jews in particular. If fact is supreme, then the mediation of the Hegelian
Negative becomes an absurdity, and no destructive use of such a Negative is
possible, which is to say that Heidegger becomes impossible, and Derrida,
who is a strong misreading of Heidegger, becomes quite unnecessary.
The Kafkan Negative most simply is his Judaism, which is to say the
spiritual form of Kafka’s self-conscious Jewishness, as exemplified in that
extraordinary aphorism: “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the nega-
tive; the positive is already given.” The positive here is the Law or norma-
tive Judaism; the negative is not so much Kafka’s new Kabbalah, as it is that
which is still laid upon us: the Judaism of the Negative, of the future as it
is always rushing towards us.
His best biographer to date, Ernst Pawel, emphasizes Kafka’s con-
sciousness “of his identity as a Jew, not in the religious, but in the nation-
al sense.” Still, Kafka was not a Zionist, and perhaps he longed not so much
for Zion as for a Jewish language, be it Yiddish or Hebrew. He could not
see that his astonishing stylistic purity in German was precisely his way of
not betraying his self-identity as a Jew. In his final phase, Kafka thought of
going to Jerusalem, and again intensified his study of Hebrew. Had he
lived, he would probably have gone to Zion, perfected a vernacular
Hebrew, and given us the bewilderment of Kafkan parables and stories in
the language of the J writer and of Judah Halevi.

What calls out for interpretation in Kafka is his refusal to be inter-


preted, his evasiveness even in the realm of his own Negative. Two of his
284 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

most beautifully enigmatical performances, both late, are the parable,


“The Problem of Our Laws,” and the story or testament “Josephine the
Singer and the Mouse Folk.” Each allows a cognitive return of Jewish cul-
tural memory, while refusing the affective identification that would make
either parable or tale specifically Jewish in either historical or contempo-
rary identification. “The Problem of Our Laws” is set as a problem in the
parable’s first paragraph:

Our laws are not generally known; they are kept secret by the small
group of nobles who rule us. We are convinced that these ancient
laws are scrupulously administered; nevertheless it is an extremely
painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not know. I am not
thinking of possible discrepancies that may arise in the interpreta-
tion of the laws, or of the disadvantages involved when only a few
and not the whole people are allowed to have a say in their inter-
pretation. These disadvantages are perhaps of no great importance.
For the laws are very ancient; their interpretation has been the
work of centuries, and has itself doubtless acquired the status of
law; and though there is still a possible freedom of interpretation
left, it has now become very restricted. Moreover the nobles have
obviously no cause to be influenced in their interpretation by per-
sonal interests inimical to us, for the laws were made to the advan-
tage of the nobles from the very beginning, they themselves stand
above the laws, and that seems to be why the laws were entrusted
exclusively into their hands. Of course, there is wisdom in that—
who doubts the wisdom of the ancient laws?—but also hardship for
us; probably that is unavoidable.

In Judaism, the Law is precisely what is generally known, proclaimed,


and taught by the normative sages. The Kabbalah was secret doctrine, but
increasingly was guarded not by the normative rabbis, but by Gnostic sec-
taries, Sabbatarians, and Frankists, all of them ideologically descended
from Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Zvi’s prophet. Kafka twists askew the rela-
tions between normative and esoteric Judaism, again making a synecdochal
representation impossible. It is not the rabbis or normative sages who
stand above the Torah but the minim, the heretics from Elisha ben Abuyah
through to Jacob Frank, and in some sense, Gershom Scholem as well. To
these Jewish Gnostics, as the parable goes on to insinuate: “The Law is
whatever the nobles do.” So radical a definition tells us “that the tradition
is far from complete,” and that a kind of messianic expectation is therefore
necessary. This view, so comfortless as far as the present is concerned, is
Novelists and Novels 285

lightened only by the belief that a time will eventually come when the tra-
dition and our research into it will jointly reach their conclusion, and as it
were gain a breathing space, when everything will have become clear, the
law will belong to the people, and the nobility will vanish.
If the parable at this point were to be translated into early Christian
terms, then “the nobility” would be the Pharisees, and “the people” would
be the Christian believers. But Kafka moves rapidly to stop such a transla-
tion: “This is not maintained in any spirit of hatred against the nobility;
not at all, and by no one. We are more inclined to hate ourselves, because
we have not yet shown ourselves worthy of being entrusted with the laws.”
“We” here cannot be either Christians or Jews. Who then are those
who “have not yet shown ourselves worthy of being entrusted with the
laws”? They would appear to be the crows or jackdaws again, a Kafka or a
Hunter Gracchus, wandering about in a state perhaps vulnerable to self-
hatred or self-distrust, waiting for a Torah that will not be revealed.
Audaciously, Kafka then concludes with overt paradox:

Actually one can express the problem only in a sort of paradox:


Any party that would repudiate not only all belief in the laws, but
the nobility as well, would have the whole people behind it; yet no
such party can come into existence, for nobody would dare to
repudiate the nobility. We live on this razor’s edge. A writer once
summed the matter up in this way: The sole visible and indu-
bitable law that is imposed upon us is the nobility, and must we
ourselves deprive ourselves of that one law?

Why would no one dare to repudiate the nobility, whether we read them
as normative Pharisees, Jewish Gnostic heresiarchs, or whatever? Though
imposed upon us, the sages or the minim are the only visible evidence of law
that we have. Who are we then? How is the parable’s final question, whether
open or rhetorical, to be answered? “Must we ourselves deprive ourselves of
that one law?” Blake’s answer, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, was: “One
Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppression.” But what is one law for the
crows? Kafka will not tell us whether it is oppression or not.
Josephine the singer also is a crow or Kafka, rather than a mouse, and
the folk may be interpreted as an entire nation of jackdaws. The spirit of
the Negative, dominant if uneasy in “The Problem of Our Laws,” is loosed
into a terrible freedom in Kafka’s testamentary story. That is to say: in the
parable, the laws could not be Torah, though that analogue flickered near.
But in Josephine’s story, the mouse folk simultaneously are and are not the
Jewish people, and Franz Kafka both is and is not their curious singer.
286 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Cognitively the identifications are possible, as though returned from for-


getfulness, but affectively they certainly are not, unless we can assume that
crucial aspects making up the identifications have been purposefully, if
other than consciously, forgotten. Josephine’s piping is Kafka’s story, and
yet Kafka’s story is hardly Josephine’s piping.
Can there be a mode of negation neither conscious nor unconscious,
neither Hegelian nor Freudian? Kafka’s genius provides one, exposing
many shades between consciousness and the work of repression, many
demarcations far ghostlier than we could have imagined without him.
Perhaps the ghostliest come at the end of the story:

Josephine’s road, however, must go downhill. The time will soon


come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small
episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will
get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our
gatherings take place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent
even when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping notably
louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even
in her lifetime more than a simply memory? Was it not rather
because Josephine’s singing was already past losing in this way that
our people in their wisdom prized it so highly?
So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while
Josephine, redeemed from the earthly sorrows which to her think-
ing lay in wait for all chosen spirits, will happily lose herself in the
numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we
are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be for-
gotten like all her brothers.

“I am a Memory come alive,” Kafka wrote in the Diaries. Whether or


not he intended it, he was Jewish memory come alive. “Was it even in her
lifetime more than a simple memory?” Kafka asks, knowing that he too was
past losing. The Jews are no historians, in some sense, because Jewish
memory, as Yosef Yerushalmi has demonstrated, is a normative mode and
not a historical one. Kafka, if he could have prayed, might have prayed to
rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like most of his broth-
ers and sisters. But his prayer would not have been answered. When we
think of the Catholic writer, we think of Dante, who nevertheless had the
audacity to enshrine his Beatrice in the hierarchy of Paradise. If we think
of the Protestant writer, we think of Milton, a party or sect of one, who
believed that the soul was mortal, and would be resurrected only in con-
junction with the body. Think of the Jewish writer, and you must think of
Novelists and Novels 287

Kafka, who evaded his own audacity, and believed nothing, and trusted
only in the Covenant of being a writer.

The Castle

The full-scale instance of Kafka’s new Negative or new Kabbalah is The


Castle, an unfinished and unfinishable autobiographical novel which is the
story of K., the land-surveyor. What is written between its lines?
Assaulting the last earthly frontier, K. is necessarily audacious, but if what
lies beyond the frontier is represented ultimately by Klamm, an imprison-
ing silence, lord of the kenoma or cosmic emptiness, then no audacity can
suffice. You cannot redraw the frontiers, even if the authorities desired this,
when you arrive at the administrative center of a catastrophe creation,
where the demarcations hold fast against a supposed chaos or abyss, which
is actually the negative emblem of the truth that the false or marred cre-
ation refuses. The Castle is the tale of how Kafka cannot write his way back
to the abyss, of how K. cannot do his work as land-surveyor.
Part of K.’s burden is that he is not audacious enough, even though
audacity could not be enough anyway. Here is the interpretive audacity of
Erich Heller, rightly rejecting all those who identify the Castle with spiri-
tuality and authentic grace, but himself missing the ineluctable evasiveness
of Kafka’s new Kabbalah:

The Castle of Kafka’s novel is, as it were, the heavily fortified gar-
rison of a company of Gnostic demons, successfully holding an
advanced position against the maneuvers of an impatient soul.
There is no conceivable idea of divinity which could justify those
interpreters who see in the Castle the residence of “divine law and
divine grace.” Its officers are totally indifferent to good if they are
not positively wicked. Neither in their decrees nor in their activi-
ties is there any trace of love, mercy, charity, or majesty. In their
icy detachment they inspire certainly no awe, but fear and revul-
sion. Their servants are a plague to the village, “a wild, unman-
ageable lot, ruled by their insatiable impulses ... their scandalous
behavior knows no limits,” an anticipation of the blackguards who
were to become the footmen of European dictators rather than
the office boys of a divine ministry. Compared to the petty and
apparently calculated torture of this tyranny, the gods of
Shakespeare’s indignation who “kill us for their sport” are at least
majestic in their wantonness.
288 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

On such a reading, Klamm would be the Demiurge, leader of a compa-


ny of Archons, gods of this world. Kafka is too evasive and too negative to
give us so positive and simplistic an account of triumphant evil, or at least of
reigning indifference to the good. Such Gnostic symbolism would make
Klamm and his cohorts representatives of ignorance, and K. in contrast a
knower, but K. knows almost nothing, particularly about his own self, and
from the start overestimates his own strength even as he deceives himself
into the belief that the Castle underestimates him. The Castle is there pri-
marily because K. is ignorant, though K.’s deepest drive is for knowledge.
K.’s largest error throughout is his desire for a personal confrontation with
Klamm, which necessarily is impossible. K., the single crow or jackdaw,
would be sufficient to destroy the authority of Klamm, but Klamm and the
Castle of Westwest signify simply the absence of crows, the inability of K. to
achieve knowledge and therefore the impossibility of K. himself, the failure
of land-surveying or of assaulting the frontiers, of writing a new Kabbalah.
Klamm is named by Wilhelm Emrich as the interpersonal element in
the erotic, which seems to me just as subtle an error as judging Klamm to
be the Demiurge, leader of a company of Gnostic demons. It might be
more accurate to call Klamm the impersonal element in the erotic, the
drive, as Martin Greenberg does, yet even that identification is evaded by
Kafka’s text. Closer to Klamm, as should be expected, is the negative aspect
of the drive, its entropy, whose effect upon consciousness is nihilistic.
Freud, in his posthumous An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940) says of the
drives that “they represent the somatic demands upon mental life.” That
approximates Klamm, but only if you give priority to Thanatos over Eros,
to the death drive over sexuality. Emrich, a touch humorlessly, even iden-
tifies Klamm with Eros, which would give us a weird Eros indeed:

Accordingly, then, Klamm is the “power” that brings the lovers


together as well as the power which, bestowing happiness and
bliss, is present within love itself. K. seeks contact with this power,
sensing its proximity in love, a proximity great enough for com-
municating in whispers; but he must “manifest” such communica-
tion and contact with this power itself through a spiritual-intel-
lectual expression of his own; this means that, as an independent
spiritual-intellectual being, he must confront this power eye to
eye, as it were; he must “manifest” to this superpersonal power his
own understanding, his own relation with it, a relation “known”
only to him at the present time; that means, he must make this
relation known to the power as well.
Novelists and Novels 289

Emrich seems to found this equation on the love affair between K. and
Frieda, which begins, in famous squalor, on the floor of a bar:

Fortunately Frieda soon came back; she did not mention K., she
only complained about the peasants, and in the course of looking
round for K. went behind the counter, so that he was able to touch
her foot. From that moment he felt safe. Since Frieda made no
reference to K., however, the landlord was compelled to do it.
“And where is the Land-Surveyor?” he asked. He was probably
courteous by nature, refined by constant and relatively free inter-
course with men who were much his superior, but there was
remarkable consideration in his tone to Frieda, which was all the
more striking because in his conversation he did not cease to be
an employer addressing a servant, and a saucy servant at that.
“The Land-Surveyor—I forgot all about him,” said Frieda, setting
her small foot on K.’s chest. “He must have gone out long ago.”
“But I haven’t seen him,” said the landlord, “and I was in the hall
nearly the whole time.” “Well, he isn’t in here,” said Frieda cool-
ly. “Perhaps he’s hidden somewhere,” said the landlord. “From the
impression I had of him, he’s capable of a good deal.” “He would
hardly dare to do that,” said Frieda, pressing her foot down on K.
There was a certain mirth and freedom about her which K. had
not previously noticed, and quite unexpectedly it took the upper
hand, for suddenly laughing she bent down to K. with the words:
“Perhaps he’s hidden underneath here,” kissed him lightly, and
sprang up again saying with a troubled air: “No, he’s not there.”
Then the landlord, too, surprised K. when he said: “It bothers me
not to know for certain that he’s gone. Not only because of Herr
Klamm, but because of the rule of the house. And the rule applies
to you, Fräulein Frieda, just as much as to me. Well, if you answer
for the bar, I’ll go through the rest of the rooms. Good night!
Sleep well!” He could hardly have left the room before Frieda had
turned out the electric light and was under the counter beside K.
“My darling! My darling!” she whispered, but she did not touch
him. As if swooning with love, she lay on her back and stretched
out her arms; time must have seemed endless to her in the
prospect of her happiness, and she sighed rather than sang some
little song or other. Then as K. still lay absorbed in thought, she
started up and began to tug at him like a child. “Come on, it’s too
close down here,” and they embraced each other, her little body
burned in K.’s hands, in a state of unconsciousness which K. tried
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again and again but in vain to master they rolled a little way, land-
ing with a thud on Klamm’s door, where they lay among the small
puddles of beer and other refuse scattered on the floor.

“Landing with a thud on Klamm’s door” is Kafka’s outrageously ran-


cid trope for a successful completion to copulation, but that hardly makes
Klamm into a benign Eros, with his devotees lying “among the small pud-
dles of beer and other refuse scattered on the floor.” One could recall the
libertines among the Gnostics, ancient and modern, who seek to redeem
the sparks upwards by a redemption through sin. Frieda, faithful disciple
and former mistress of Klamm, tells K. that she believes it is Klamm’s,
“doing that we came together there under the counter; blessed, not cursed,
be the hour.” Emrich gives full credence to Frieda, a rather dangerous act
for an exegete, and certainly K. desperately believes Frieda, but then, as
Heller remarks, “K. loves Frieda—if he loves her at all—entirely for
Klamm’s sake.” That K., despite his drive for freedom, may be deceived as
to Klamm’s nature is understandable, but I do not think that Kafka was
deceived or wished to be deceived. If Klamm is to be identified, it ought to
be with what is silent, imprisoned, and unavailable in copulation, some-
thing that partakes of the final Negative, the drive towards death.
Whether The Castle is of the aesthetic eminence of Kafka’s finest sto-
ries, parables, and fragments is open to considerable doubt, but The Castle
is certainly the best text for studying Kafka’s Negative, his hidden and sub-
versive New Kabbalah. It abides as the most enigmatic major novel of our
century, and one sees why Kafka himself thought it a failure. But all
Kabbalah—old and new—has to fail when it offers itself openly to more
than a handful. Perhaps The Castle fails as the Zohar fails, but like the
Zohar, Kafka’s Castle will go on failing from one era to another.

The Trial

“Guilt” generally seems more a Christian than a Jewish category, even if


the guilt of Joseph K. is primarily ignorance of the Law. Certainly Kafka
could be judged closer to Freud in The Trial than he usually is, since
Freudian “guilt” is also hardly distinct from ignorance, not of the Law but
of the Reality Principle. Freud insisted that all authority, communal or
personal, induced guilt in us, since we share in the murder of the totemic
father. Guilt therefore is never to be doubted, but only because we are all
of us more or less ill, all plagued by our discomfort with culture. Freudian
and Kafkan guilt alike is known only under the sign of negation, rather
than as emotion. Joseph K. has no consciousness of having done wrong,
Novelists and Novels 291

but just as Freudian man nurtures the desire to destroy authority or the
father, so even Joseph K. has his own unfulfilled wishes against the image
of the Law.
The process that Joseph K. undergoes is hopeless, since the Law is
essentially a closed Kabbalah; its books are not available to the accused. If
traditional questers suffered an ordeal by landscape, Joseph K.’s ordeal is
by nearly everything and everyone he encounters. The representatives of
the Law, and their camp followers, are so unsavory that Joseph K. seems
sympathetic by contrast, yet he is actually a poor fellow in himself, and
would be as nasty as the keepers of the Law, if only he could. The Trial is a
very unpleasant book, and Kafka’s own judgment of it may have been spir-
itually wiser than anything its critics have enunciated. Would there be any
process for us to undergo if we were not both lazy and frightened?
Nietzsche’s motive for metaphor was the desire to be different, the desire
to be elsewhere, but Kafka’s sense of our motive is that we want to rest,
even if just for a moment. The world is our Gnostic catastrophe creation,
being broken into existence by the guilt of our repose. Yet this is creation,
and can be visibly beautiful, even as the accused are beautiful in the gaze
of the camp followers of the Law.
I do not think that the process Joseph K. undergoes can be called
“interpretation,” which is the judgment of Ernst Pawel, who follows
Jewish tradition in supposing that the Law is language. The Trial, like the
rest of Kafka’s writings, is a parable not of interpretation, but of the neces-
sary failure of interpretation. I would surmise that the Law is not all of lan-
guage, since the language of The Trial is ironic enough to suggest that it is
not altogether bound to the Law. If The Trial has a center, it is in what
Kafka thought worthy of publishing: the famous parable “Before the Law.”
The dialogue concerning the parable between Joseph K. and the prison
chaplain who tells it is remarkable, but less crucial than the parable itself:

Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeep-


er there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance
to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man
at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed,
then, to enter later. “It is possible,” answers the doorkeeper, “but
not at this moment.” Since the door leading into the Law stands
open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends
down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees
that; he laughs and says: “If you are so strongly tempted, try to get
in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am
only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at
292 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of
these has an aspect that even I cannot bear to look at.” These are
difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to
meet; the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at
all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his
furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar
beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission
to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down
at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years.
He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the door-
keeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him
in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other
matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men
put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the
man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped
himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has,
however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The
doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: “I
take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left some-
thing undone.” During all these long years the man watches the
doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other door-
keepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between him-
self and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud;
later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows child-
ish, and since in his prolonged watch he has learned to know even
the fleas in the doorkeeper’s fur collar, he begs the very fleas to
help him and to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind.
Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the
world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only
deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance
that streams immortally from the door of the Law. Now his life is
drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced dur-
ing the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one
question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beck-
ons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening
body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the
difference in size between them has increased very much to the
man’s disadvantage. “What do you want to know now?” asks the
doorkeeper, “you are insatiable.” “Everyone strives to attain the
Law,” answers the man, “how does it come about, then, that in all
these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?” The
Novelists and Novels 293

doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and
that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: “No one but
you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was
intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

Does he actually perceive a radiance, or are his eyes perhaps still


deceiving him? What would admittance to the radiance mean? The Law, I
take it, has the same status it has in the later parable “The Problem of Our
Laws,” where it cannot be Torah, or the Jewish Law, yet Torah flickers
uneasily near as a positive analogue to the negation that is playing itself
out. Joseph K. then is another jackdaw, another Kafkan crow in a cosmos
of crows, waiting for that new Torah that will not be revealed. Does such
a waiting allow itself to be represented in or by a novel? No one could
judge The Trial to be grander as a whole than in its parts, and “Before the
Law” bursts out of its narrative shell in the novel. The terrible greatness of
Kafka is absolute in the parable but wavering in the novel, too impure a
casing for such a fire.
That there should be nothing but a spiritual world, Kafka once wrote,
denies us hope but gives us certainty. The certainty would seem to be not
so much that a radiance exists, but that all access to it will be barred by
petty officials at least countenanced, if not encouraged, by what passes for
the radiance itself. This is not paradox, any more than is the Kafkan prin-
ciple propounded by the priest who narrates “Before the Law”: accurate
interpretation and misreading cannot altogether exclude one another.
Kafka’s aesthetic compulsion (can there be such?) in The Trial as elsewhere
is to write so as to create a necessity, yet also so as to make interpretation
impossible, rather than merely difficult.
Kafka’s permanent centrality to the post-normative Jewish dilemma
achieves one of its monuments in The Trial. Gershom Scholem found in
Kafka not only the true continuator of the Gnostic Kabbalah of Moses
Cordovero, but also the central representative for our time of an even
more archaic splendor, the broken radiance of Hebraic revelation. Perhaps
Scholem was right, for no other modern Jewish author troubles us with so
strong an impression that we are in the presence of what Scholem called
“the strong light of the canonical, of the perfection that destroys.”
N O V E L S
A N D

D.H. Lawrence
N O V E L I S T S

(1885–1930)

LAWRENCE, HARDLY A LIBERTINE, HAD THE RADICALLY PROTESTANT


sensibility of Milton, Shelley, Browning, Hardy—none of them Eliotic
favorites. To say that Lawrence was more a Puritan than Milton is only to
state what is now finely obvious. What Lawrence shares with Milton is an
intense exaltation of unfallen human sexuality. With Blake, Lawrence
shares the conviction that touch, the sexual sense proper, is the least fallen
of the senses, which implies that redemption is most readily a sexual
process. Freud and Lawrence, according to Lawrence, share little or noth-
ing, which accounts for Lawrence’s ill-informed but wonderfully vigorous
polemic against Freud:

This is the moral dilemma of psychoanalysis. The analyst sets out


to core neurotic humanity by removing the cause of the neurosis.
He finds that the cause of neurosis lies in some unadmitted sex
desire. After all he has said about inhibition of normal sex, he is
brought at last to realize that at the root of almost every neurosis
lies some incest-craving, and that this incest-craving is not the result
of inhibition and normal sex-craving. Now see the dilemma—it is a
fearful one. If the incest-craving is not the outcome of any inhibi-
tion of normal desire, if it actually exists and refuses to give way
before any criticism, what then? What remains but to accept it as
part of the normal sex-manifestation?
Here is an issue which analysis is perfectly willing to face.
Among themselves the analysts are bound to accept the incest-
craving as part of the normal sexuality of man, normal, but sup-
pressed, because of moral and perhaps biological fear. Once, how-
ever, you accept the incest-craving as part of the normal sexuality

294
Novelists and Novels 295

of man, you must remove all repression of incest itself. In fact, you
must admit incest as you now admit sexual marriage, as a duty
even. Since at last it works out that neurosis is not the result of
inhibition of so-called normal sex, but of inhibition of incest-crav-
ing. Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it
causes neurosis and insanity. Therefore the inhibition of incest-
craving is wrong, and this wrong is the cause of practically all
modern neurosis and insanity.

To believe that Freud thought that “any inhibition must be wrong” is


merely outrageous. Philip Rieff subtly defends Lawrence’s weird accusa-
tion by remarking that: “As a concept, the incest taboo, like any other
Freudian hypothesis, represents a scientific projection of the false stan-
dards governing erotic relations within the family.” Lawrence surely
sensed this, but chose to misunderstand Freud for some of the same rea-
sons he chose to misunderstand Walt Whitman. Whitman provoked in
Lawrence an anxiety of influence in regard to stance and form. Freud, also
too authentic a precursor, threatened Lawrence’s therapeutic originality.
Like Freud’s, Lawrence’s ideas of drive or will stem from Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. Again like Freud, Lawrence derived considerable stimulus
from later nineteenth-century materialistic thought. It is difficult to
remember that so flamboyant a mythmaker as Lawrence was also a deide-
alizer with a reductionist aspect, but then we do not see that Freud was a
great mythmaker only because we tend to believe in Freud’s myths. When
I was young, I knew many young women and young men who believed in
Lawrence’s myths, but they all have weathered the belief, and I do not
encounter any Lawrentian believers among the young today.

Sons and Lovers

Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), his third novel, was begun in 1910 as
Paul Morel, and in some sense was finished by Edward Garnett, who made
severe cuts in the final manuscript. The change of title from Paul Morel to
Sons and Lovers may have been Lawrence’s gesture towards Freud, as medi-
ated by Frieda Weekley, with whom Lawrence eloped in the spring of 1912
and under whose early influence the novel was completed. Lawrence
attempted to fight off Freud later on, in two very odd books on the uncon-
scious, but Sons and Lovers is so available to Freudian reduction as to make
a Freudian reading of the novel quite uninteresting.
Though Sons and Lovers is clearly the work of the author of The Rainbow
and Women in Love, it retains many of the characteristics of the fiction of
296 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Thomas Hardy and has little of the visionary intensity that the mature
Lawrence shares with Moby-Dick, Wuthering Heights, and only a few other
novels. Rereading Sons and Lovers is a somber and impressive experience, if
a rather mixed one aesthetically. It is difficult to know if we are reading an
autobiographical novel rather than a novelistic autobiography. The aes-
thetic puzzle is in deciding how to receive Lawrence’s self-portrait as Paul
Morel. If the reader simply decides that the identification of the writer and
his hero is complete, then the experience of reading necessarily is vexed by
the identification of Gertrude Morel with Lydia Lawrence, the novelist’s
mother, and so also by the parody of Arthur Lawrence in the novel’s
Walter Morel. Even more troublesome is the identification of Jessie
Chambers, the novelist’s first love, with Miriam. By the time one has read
D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by Jessie Chambers and studied such stan-
dard biographies of Lawrence as those by Nehls, Moore, and Sagar, it
becomes very difficult to know whether the novel is the appropriate genre
for Lawrence’s story. Miriam and Walter Morel seem abused in Sons and
Lovers, and Paul Morel seems quite blind to his mother’s real culpability in
malforming his psychosexual development.
A curious reader or student of D.H. Lawrence will search out the
appropriate material in the composite biography of Nehls, but I am dubi-
ous as to whether Sons and Lovers gains aesthetically by such an enrichment
of personal context. Louis L. Martz has argued that a close reading will
show that the novel depicts Miriam as life-enhancing and Gertrude Morel
as an agent of repression, but the book’s actual narrative voice tends to give
an impression much closer to that of Paul, who ends by leaving Miriam
and then confronting a motherless Sublime that has no place for him:

He shook hands and left her at the door of her cousin’s house.
When he turned away he felt the last hold for him had gone. The
town, as he sat upon the car, stretched away over the bay of rail-
way, a level fume of lights. Beyond the town the country, little
smouldering spots for more towns—the sea—the night—on and
on! And he had no place in it! Whatever spot he stood on, there
he stood alone. From his breast, from his mouth, sprang the end-
less space, and it was there behind him, everywhere. The people
hurrying along the streets offered no obstruction to the void in
which he found himself. They were small shadows whose foot-
steps and voices could be heard, but in each of them the same
night, the same silence. He got off the car. In the country all was
dead still. Little stars shone high up; little stars spread far away in
the flood-waters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness and
Novelists and Novels 297

terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief
while by the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eter-
nal, holding everything in its silence and its living gloom. There
was no Time, only Space. Who could say his mother had lived and
did not live? She had been in one place, and was in another; that
was all. And his soul could not leave her, wherever she was. Now
she was gone abroad into the night, and he was with her still.
They were together. But yet there was his body, his chest, that
leaned against the stile, his hands on the wooden bar. They
seemed something. Where was he?—one tiny upright speck of
flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear
it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him,
so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could
not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching
out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went
spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace,
there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left than tiny and
daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a noth-
ingness, and yet not nothing.
“Mother!” he whimpered—“mother!”
She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this.
And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch
him, have him alongside with her.
But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked
towards the city’s gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his
mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness,
to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing
town, quickly.

We understand, after reading this conclusion to Sons and Lovers, why


Walt Whitman came to have so powerful an influence upon Lawrence’s
later poetry, since the elegiac Whitman identified night, death, the moth-
er, and the sea, and only the sea is absent from the fusion here. Nothing
else in Sons and Lovers is quite as strong as this closing vision, which does
prophesy the greater harmonies and discords of The Rainbow and Women in
Love.
Aside from the troublesome strains of unassimilated autobiography,
the principal defect of Sons and Lovers is that Paul Morel does not always
seem energetic or sympathetic enough to sustain our interest. At
moments we might be reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prig, and
we then want to congratulate Miriam for not ending up with the hero.
298 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The novel has force of narrative despite lack of plot, and deserves all the
praise it has received as an unmatched account of English working-class
life. But the sincerity or veracity of Lawrence’s story of his own origins is
more of a social than an aesthetic virtue in Sons and Lovers. What redeems
the book aesthetically is a series of passages and incidents that presage the
massive excursions into the Sublime made in The Rainbow and Women in
Love. The concluding passage is one of these; others include such fatuous
moments as Paul and Miriam taking turns on the swing, and the fight
between Paul and Baxter Dawes (who is oddly the most convincing char-
acter in the novel). These are early forms of what might be called
Lawrence’s epiphanies, times when elemental forces break through the
surfaces of existence. Lawrence hardly knows what to do with them in
Sons and Lovers; they do not reverberate with enormous possibilities as do
such moments in Women in Love as Birkin stoning the moon’s reflection in
the water, or Birkin and Gerald caught up in their wrestling match. Yet
the shadowy epiphanies of Sons and Lovers have the value of preparatory
exercises for those fragments of a giant art that Lawrence later scattered
so generously in his work.

The Rainbow and Women in Love

Lawrence’s greatest achievement is his double-novel, The Rainbow (1915)


and Women in Love (1920). Together with his short stories and the best of
his poems, these represent his absolute literary permanence, obscured as
that currently may be by the virulence of much Feminist criticism.
I recall, many years ago, writing that, “In the endless war between men
and women, Lawrence fights on both sides.” The twenty-third chapter of
Women in Love, “Excurse,” is an eminent instance:

“I jealous! I—jealous! You are mistaken if you think that. I’m


not jealous in the least of Hermione, she is nothing to me, not
that!” And Ursula snapped her fingers. “No, it’s you who are a liar.
It’s you who must return, like a dog to his vomit. It is what
Hermione stands for that I hate. I hate it. It is lies, it is false, it is
death. But you want to, you can’t help it, you can’t help yourself.
You belong to that old, deathly way of living—then go back to it.
But don’t come to me, for I’ve nothing to do with it.”
And in the stress of her violent emotion, she got down from
the car and went to the hedgerow, picking unconsciously some
flesh-pink spindleberries, some of which were burst, showing
their orange seeds.
Novelists and Novels 299

“Ah, you are a fool,” he cried bitterly, with some contempt.


“Yes, I am. I am a fool. And thank God for it. I’m too big a fool
to swallow your cleverness. God be praised. You go to your
women—go to them—they are your sort—you’ve always had a
string of them trailing after you—and you always will. Go to your
spiritual brides—but don’t come to me as well, because I’m not
having any, thank you. You’re not satisfied, are you? Your spiritu-
al brides can’t give you what you want, they aren’t common and
fleshy enough for you, aren’t they? So you come to me, and keep
them in the background! You will marry me for daily use. But
you’ll keep yourself well provided with spiritual brides in the
background. I know your dirty little game.” Suddenly a flame ran
over her, and she stamped her foot madly on the road, and he
winced, afraid she would strike him. “And I, I’m not spiritual
enough. I’m not as spiritual as that Hermione—!” Her brows knit-
ted, her eyes blazed like a tiger’s. “Then go to her, that’s all I say,
go to her, go. Ha, she spiritual—spiritual, she! A dirty materialist as
she is. She spiritual? What does she care for, what is her spiritual-
ity? What is it?” Her fury seemed to blaze out and burn his face.
He shrank a little. “I tell you, it’s dirt, dirt, and nothing but dirt.
And it’s dirt you want, you crave for it. Spiritual! Is that spiritual,
her bullying, her conceit, her sordid materialism? She’s a fishwife,
a fishwife, she is such a materialist. And all so sordid. What does
she work out to, in the end, with all her social passion, as you call
it. Social passion—what social passion has she?—show it me!—
where is it? She wants petty, immediate power, she wants the illu-
sion that she is a great woman, that is all. In her soul she’s a dev-
ilish unbeliever, common as dirt. That’s what she is, at the bottom.
And all the rest is pretence—but you love it. You love the sham
spiritually, it’s your food. And why? Because of the dirt under-
neath. Do you think I don’t know the foulness of your sex life—
and hers?—I do. And it’s that foulness you want, you liar. Then
have it, have it. You’re such a liar.”
She turned away, spasmodically tearing the twigs of spindle-
berry from the hedge, and fastening them, with vibrating fingers,
in the bosom of her coat.
He stood watching in silence. A wonderful tenderness burned
in him at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the
same time he was full of rage and callousness.

The ambivalence of the lovers, so memorably rendered, reflects not


300 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

only Lawrence’s stormy marriage with Frieda, but his own repressed bisex-
uality as well. And yet the passage matters aesthetically because of the mar-
velous detail, at once literal and metaphoric, or Ursula’s tearing of the
spindleberries, flesh-like and bursting with life. Lawrence had the rare gift,
inherited from Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy, of portraying a
woman’s anger with total sympathy and virtual identification. Since Birkin
is a deliberate parody of the prophetic Lawrence, fiercely exalting yet also
recoiling from sexual love, Ursula’s fury is accurate and precise.
After Shakespeare and Tolstoy, no writer expresses more vividly than
Lawrence the perpetually prevalent male ambivalence towards female
superiority in natural sexuality. A powerful example in Lawrence is the
farewell love-making between Ursula and Skrebensky near the close of The
Rainbow:

Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him,
hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fas-
tened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst
her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till
his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from
the fierce, beaked, harpy’s kiss. The water washed again over their
feet, but she took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to
be pressing in her beaked mouth till she had the heart of him.
Then, at last, she drew away and looked at him—looked at him.
He knew what she wanted. He took her by the hand and led her
across the foreshore, back to the sandhills. She went silently. He
felt as if the ordeal of proof was upon him, for life or death. He
led her to a dark hollow.
“No, here,” she said, going out to the slope full under the
moonshine. She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at
the moon. He came direct to her, without preliminaries. She held
him pinned down at the chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for
consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his soul,
till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead, lay with his face
buried, partly in her hair, partly in the sand, motionless now for
ever, hidden away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only want-
ed to be buried in the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.
He seemed to swoon. It was a long time before he came to him-
self. He was unaware of an unusual motion of her breast. He
looked up. Her face lay like an image in the moonlight, the eyes
wide open, rigid. But out of her eyes, slowly, there rolled a tear,
that glittered in the moonlight as it ran down her cheek.
Novelists and Novels 301

He felt as if the knife were being pushed into his already dead
body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some
minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in the
moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eye, in which slowly the water
gathered, shook with glittering moonlight, then surcharged,
brimmed over and ran trickling, a tear with its burden of moon-
light, into the darkness, to fall in the sand.

In his great poem, “Tortoise Shout,” Lawrence epitomized the gnosis


of Skrebensky’s “bitterness of ecstasy”:

Why were we crucified into sex?


Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

Lawrence’s unique power, as a prophetic novelist, tends now to make


even his admirers a touch uneasy. In his later novels, such as Kangaroo
(1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928), the literary artist is overcome by the prophet, and Lawrence bruis-
es the limits of narrative, making it difficult to reread him with sustained
attention. But in The Rainbow and Women in Love we trust the tales, and not
their teller.
N O V E L S
A N D

Sinclair Lewis
N O V E L I S T S

(1885–1951)

Arrowsmith and Babbitt

IT CANNOT BE SAID, THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, THAT SINCLAIR


Lewis is forgotten or ignored, yet clearly his reputation has declined con-
siderably. Arrowsmith (1925) is still a widely read novel, particularly, among
the young, but Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) seem to be best known
for their titles, while Elmer Gantry (1927) and Dodsworth (1929) are remem-
bered in their movie versions. Rereading Main Street and Elmer Gantry has
disappointed me, but Babbitt and Dodsworth, both good novels, deserve
more readers than they now seem to have. Lewis is of very nearly no inter-
est whatsoever to American literary critics of my own generation and
younger, so that it seems likely his decline in renown will continue.
A Nobel prizewinner, like John Steinbeck, Lewis resembles Steinbeck
only in that regard, and is now being eclipsed by Faulkner, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and such older contemporaries as Cather and Dreiser. Lewis
venerated Dickens, but the critical age when Lewis’s achievement could be
compared to that of Dickens or of Balzac is long ago over. Hamlin Garland,
an actual precursor, is necessarily far more comparable to Lewis than
Dickens or Balzac are. If, as Baudelaire may have remarked, every janitor
in Balzac is a genius, then every genius in Lewis is something of a janitor.
Essentially a satirist with a camera-eye, Lewis was a master neither of nar-
rative nor of characterization. And his satire, curiously affectionate at its
base (quite loving towards Babbitt), has no edge in the contemporary
United States, where reality is frequently too outrageous for any literary
satire to be possible.

302
Novelists and Novels 303

Lewis has considerable historical interest, aside from the winning


qualities of Babbitt and the surprising Dodsworth, but he is likely to survive
because of his least characteristic, most idealistic novel, Arrowsmith. A
morality tale, with a medical research scientist as hero, Arrowsmith has
enough mythic force to compel a young reader to an idealism of her or his
own. Critics have found in Arrowsmith Lewis’s version of the idealism of
Emerson and Thoreau, pitched lower in Lewis, who had no transcenden-
tal yearnings. The native strain in our literature that emanated out from
Emerson into Whitman and Thoreau appears also in Arrowsmith, and
helps account for the novel’s continued relevance as American myth.

II

H.L. Mencken, who greatly admired Arrowsmith, upon expectedly ide-


ological grounds, still caught the flaw in the hero, and the aesthetic virtue
in the splendid villain, Pickerbaugh:

Pickerbaugh exists everywhere, in almost every American town.


He is the quack who flings himself melodramatically upon
measles, chicken pox, whooping cough—the organizer of Health
Weeks and author of prophylactic, Kiwanian slogans—the hero of
clean-up campaigns—the scientific beau ideal of newspaper
reporters, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, and the pastors of suburban
churches. He has been leering at the novelists of America for
years, and yet Lewis and De Kruif were the first to see and hail
him. They have made an almost epic figure of him. He is the
Babbitt of this book—far more charming than Arrowsmith him-
self, and far more real. Arrowsmith fails in one important partic-
ular: he is not typical, he is not a good American. I daresay that
many a reader, following his struggles with the seekers for “prac-
tical” results, will sympathize frankly with the latter. After all, it is
not American to prefer honor to honors; no man, pursuing that
folly, could ever hope to be president of the United States.
Pickerbaugh will cause no such lifting of eyebrows. Like Babbitt,
he will be recognized instantly and enjoyed innocently. Within six
weeks, I suspect, every health officer in America will be receiving
letters denouncing him as a Pickerbaugh. Thus nature imitates
art.

Mencken’s irony has been denuded by time; Arrowsmith is indeed not


typical, not a good American, not a persuasive representation of a person.
304 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Neither is anyone else in the novel a convincing mimesis of actuality; that


was hardly Lewis’s strength, which resided in satiric caricature. Arrowsmith
ought to be more a satire than a novel, but unfortunately its hero is an ide-
alized self-portrait of Sinclair Lewis. Idealization of science, and of the
pure scientist—Arrowsmith and his mentor, Gottlieb—is what most dates
the novel. I myself first read it in 1945, when I was a student at the Bronx
High School of Science, then an abominable institution of the highest and
most narrow academic standards. As a nonscientist, I found myself sur-
rounded by a swarm of hostile and aggressive fellow-students, most of
whom have become successful Babbitts of medicine, physics, and related
disciplines. Arrowsmith, with its naive exaltation of science as a pure quest
for truth, had a kind of biblical status in that high school, and so I read it
with subdued loathing. Rereading it now, I find a puzzled affection to be
my principal reaction, but I doubt the aesthetic basis for my current atti-
tude.
Though sadly dated, Arrowsmith is too eccentric a work to be judged
a period piece. It is a romance, with allegorical overtones, but a romance
in which everything is literalized, a romance of science, as it were, rather
than a science fiction. Its hero, much battered, does not learn much; he
simply becomes increasingly more abrupt and stubborn, and votes with his
feet whenever marriages, institutions, and other societal forms begin to
menace his pure quest for scientific research. In the romance’s pastoral
conclusion, Arrowsmith retreats to the woods, a Thoreau pursuing the
exact mechanism of the action of quinine derivatives. Romance depends
upon a curious blend of wholeheartedness and sophistication in its author,
and Sinclair Lewis was not Edmund Spenser:

His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound as


Terry’s, his indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings as
great, his industry as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new appa-
ratus at least comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He
had less ease but more passion. He hurled out hypotheses like
sparks. He began, incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He
would yet determine the essential nature of phage; and as he
became stronger and surer—and no doubt less human—he saw
ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemotherapy and immu-
nity; enough adventures to keep him busy for decades.
It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen
and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first
plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast,
they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles
Novelists and Novels 305

on end, they had bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors;


and when they had worked all night, they came out to find serene
dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.
Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he
hummed.

I do not believe that this could sustain commentary, of any kind. It is


competent romance writing, of the Boy’s Own Book variety, but cries out
for the corrected American version, as carried through by Nathanael West
in A Cool Million, and in Miss Lonelyhearts. West’s Shrike would be capable
of annihilating salvation through back to nature and pure research, by
promising: “You feel sun-soaked, and deep of chest, and always you hum.”
Arrowsmith was published in the same year as The Great Gatsby and An
American Tragedy, which was hardly Lewis’s fault, but now seems his last-
ing misfortune. Babbitt came out the same year as Ulysses, while Dodsworth
confronted The Sound and the Fury. None of this is fair, but the agonistic
element in literature is immemorial. Arrowsmith is memorable now
because it is a monument to another American lost illusion, the idealism of
pure science, or the search for a truth that could transcend the pragmatics
of American existence. It is a fitting irony that the satirist Sinclair Lewis
should be remembered now for this idealizing romance.
N O V E L S
A N D

Zora Neale Hurston


N O V E L I S T S

(1891–1960)

Their Eyes Were Watching God


I

EXTRA-LITERARY FACTORS HAVE ENTERED INTO THE PROCESS OF EVEN


secular canonization from Hellenistic Alexandria into the High Modernist
Era of Eliot and Pound, so that it need not much dismay us if contemporary
work by women and by minority writers becomes esteemed on grounds other
than aesthetic. When the High Modernist critic Hugh Kenner assures us of
the permanent eminence of the novelist and polemicist Wyndham Lewis, we
can be persuaded, unless of course we actually read books like Tarr and Hitler.
Reading Lewis is a rather painful experience, and makes me skeptical of
Kenner’s canonical assertions. In the matter of Zora Neale Hurston, I have
had a contrary experience, starting with skepticism when I first encountered
essays by her admirers, let alone by her idolators. Reading Their Eyes Were
Watching God dispels all skepticism. Moses: Man of the Mountain is an impres-
sive book in its mode and ambitions, but a mixed achievement, unable to
resolve problems of diction and of rhetorical stance. Essentially, Hurston is
the author of one superb and moving novel, unique not in its kind but in its
isolated excellence among other stories of the kind.
The wistful opening of Their Eyes Were Watching God pragmatically
affirms greater repression in women as opposed to men, by which I mean
“repression” only in Freud’s sense: unconscious yet purposeful forgetting:

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember,
and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is
the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

306
Novelists and Novels 307

Hurston’s Janie is now necessarily a paradigm for women, of whatever


race, heroically attempting to assert their own individuality in contexts that
continue to resent and fear any consciousness that is not male. In a larger
perspective, should the contexts modify, the representation of Janie will
take its significant place in a long tradition of such representations in
English and American fiction. This tradition extends from Samuel
Richardson to Doris Lessing and other contemporaries, but only rarely has
been able to visualize authentically strong women who begin with all the
deprivations that circumstance assigns to Janie. It is a crucial aspect of
Hurston’s subtle sense of limits that the largest limitation is that imposed
upon Janie by her grandmother, who loves her best, yet fears for her the
most.
As a former slave, the grandmother, Nanny, is haunted by the com-
pensatory dream of making first her daughter, and then her granddaugh-
ter, something other than “the mule of the world,” customary fate of the
black woman. The dream is both powerful enough, and sufficiently uni-
tary, to have driven Janie’s mother away, and to condemn Janie herself to a
double disaster of marriages, before the tragic happiness of her third match
completes as much of her story as Hurston desires to give us. As readers,
we carry away with us what Janie never quite loses, the vivid pathos of her
grandmother’s superb and desperate displacement of hope:

“And, Janie, maybe it wasn’t much, but Ah done de best Ah kin


by you. Ah raked and scraped and bought dis lil piece uh land so
you wouldn’t have to stay in de white folks’ yard and tuck yo’ head
befo’ other chillun at school. Dat was all right when you was lit-
tle. But when you got big enough to understand things, Ah want-
ed you to look upon yo’self. Ah don’t want yo’ feathers always
crumpled by folks throwin’ up things in yo’ face. And Ah can’t die
easy thinkin’ maybe de menfolks white or black is makin’ a spit
cup outa you: Have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy,
Janie, Ah’m a cracked plate.”

II

Hurston’s rhetorical strength, even in Their Eyes Were Watching God,


is frequently too overt, and threatens an excess, when contrasted with the
painful simplicity of her narrative line and the reductive tendency at
work in all her characters except for Janie and Nanny. Yet the excess
works, partly because Hurston is so considerable and knowing a mythol-
ogist. Hovering in Their Eyes Were Watching God is the Mosaic myth of
308 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

deliverance, the pattern of revolution and exodus that Hurston reimagines


as her prime trope of power:

But there are other concepts of Moses abroad in the world. Asia
and all the Near East are sown with legends of this character.
They are so numerous and so varied that some students have
come to doubt if the Moses of the Christian concept is real. Then
Africa has her mouth on Moses. All across the continent there are
the legends of the greatness of Moses, but not because of his beard
nor because he brought the laws down from Sinai. No, he is
revered because he had the power to go up the mountain and to
bring them down. Many men could climb mountains. Anyone
could bring down laws that had been handed to them. But who
can talk with God face to face? Who has the power to command
God to go to a peak of a mountain and there demand of Him laws
with which to govern a nation? What other man has ever com-
manded the wind and the hail? The light and darkness? That calls
for power, and that is what Africa sees in Moses to worship. For
he is worshipped as a god.

Power in Hurston is always potentia, the demand for life, for more life.
Despite the differences in temperament, Hurston has affinities both with
Dreiser and with Lawrence, heroic vitalists. Her art, like theirs, exalts an
exuberance that is beauty, a difficult beauty because it participates in real-
ity-testing. What is strongest in Janie is a persistence akin to Dreiser’s
Carrie and Lawrence’s Ursula and Gudrun, a drive to survive in one’s own
fashion. Nietzsche’s vitalistic injunction, that we must try to live as though
it were morning, is the implicit basis of Hurston’s true religion, which in
its American formulation (Thoreau’s), reminds us that only that day dawns
to which we are alive. Something of Lawrence’s incessant sense of the sun
is paralleled by Hurston’s trope of the solar trajectory, in a cosmos where:
“They sat on the boarding house porch and saw the sun plunge into the
same crack in the earth from which the night emerged” and where: “Every
morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun.”
Janie’s perpetual sense of the possibilities of another day propels her
from Nanny’s vision of safety first to the catastrophe of Joe Starks and then
to the love of Tea Cake, her true husband. But to live in a way that starts
with the sun is to become pragmatically doom-eager, since mere life is dep-
recated in contrast to the possibility of glory, of life more abundant, rather
than Nanny’s dream of a refuge from exploitation. Hurston’s most effective
irony is that Janie’s drive toward her own erotic potential should transcend
Novelists and Novels 309

her grandmother’s categories, since the marriage with Tea Cake is also
Janie’s pragmatic liberation from bondage toward men. When he tells her,
in all truth, that she has the keys to the kingdom, he frees her from living
in her grandmother’s way.
A more pungent irony drove Hurston to end Janie’s idyll with Tea
Cake’s illness and the ferocity of his subsequent madness. The impulse of
her own vitalism compels Janie to kill him in self-defense, thus ending nec-
essarily life and love in the name of the possibility of more life again. The
novel’s conclusion is at once an elegy and a vision of achieved peace, an
intense realization that indeed we are all asleep in the outer life:

The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse
came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner
in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced
to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then
Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song
of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine
trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t
dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feel-
ing and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love
and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her hori-
zon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the
world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its mesh-
es! She called in her soul to come and see.

III

Hurston herself was refreshingly free of all the ideologies that cur-
rently obscure the reception of her best book. Her sense of power has
nothing in common with politics of any persuasion, with contemporary
modes of feminism, or even with those questers who search for a black aes-
thetic. As a vitalist, she was of the line of the Wife of Bath and Sir John
Falstaff and Mynheer Peeperkorn. Like them, she was outrageous, hero-
ically larger than life, witty in herself and the cause of wit in others. She
belongs now to literary legend, which is as it should be. Her famous
remark in response to Carl Van Vechten’s photographs is truly the epi-
graph to her life and work: “I love myself when I am laughing. And then
again when I am looking mean and impressive.” Walt Whitman would
have delighted in that as in her assertion: “When I set my hat at a certain
angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue ... the cosmic Zora emerges....
How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond
310 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

me.” With Whitman, Hurston herself is now an image of American liter-


ary vitality, and a part also of the American mythology of exodus, of the
power to choose the party of Eros, of more life.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940)

N O V E L S
The Great Gatsby

THE GREAT GATSBY, AFTER THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY, REMAINS A


fresh and vibrant short novel, an acknowledged American masterpiece. Its
fable has become part of the American mythology, or perhaps the American
Dream so pervades The Great Gatsby that Fitzgerald’s true achievement was
to appropriate American legend. Either way, Fitzgerald gave us both the
romance of love-and-money, and the anti-romance of its collapse into
tragedy, if “tragedy” does not seem too exalted a term for Jay Gatsby. The
book is profoundly Conradian, since Nick Carraway mediates Gatsby for
us rather in the way that Joseph Conrad’s Marlow mediates Kurtz or Lord
Jim. We do not see, hear, or know Gatsby except through Carraway’s eyes,
ears, and heart, and for Nick his friend Jay is the Romantic hero of the
American Dream.
For Carraway, Gatsby is an idealist, with a “Platonic conception of
himself.” Time, other selves, history: all these are set aside by Gatsby’s
vision of himself and the perfectly insipid Daisy Buchanan as the American
Adam and Eve. Gatsby himself is an improbable but persuasive amalgam of
an American gangster and the poet John Keats, dreaming an impossible
dream of love with his Daisy, Fanny Brawne. Gatsby is great, not just in
Carraway’s vision, but in ours, because Fitzgerald brilliantly represents in
Gatsby both the failure of the American Dream, and its perpetual refusal to
die.
Tender Is the Night, with its Keatsian title, was intended by Fitzgerald
to be his masterwork. Though the novel is at least partly a failure, it is a fas-
cinating debacle, intensely readable though somewhat diffuse. Dick Diver
is a pale figure when compared to Gatsby; the reader cannot help like

311
312 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Diver, but he lacks Gatsby’s obsessive force. Is Diver defeated by the rich,
who fascinate him, or by his own inner weakness? Rather clearly, Diver is
Fitzgerald’s own surrogate, as Gatsby never was. Diver fails and dwindles
away because of a weakness in the will, in profound contrast to Gatsby.
Perhaps all that could have saved Tender Is the Night would have been Jay
Gatsby’s resurrection from the dead, since the gangster-poet’s vitality
never possesses Dick Diver.
N O V E L I S T S
William Faulkner

A N D
(1897–1962)

N O V E L S
I

NO CRITIC NEED INVENT WILLIAM FAULKNER’S OBSESSIONS WITH WHAT


Nietzsche might have called the genealogy of the imagination. Recent crit-
ics of Faulkner, including David Minter, John T. Irwin, David M. Wyatt
and Richard H. King, have emphasized the novelist’s profound need to
believe himself to have been his own father, in order to escape not only the
Freudian family romance and literary anxieties of influence, but also the
cultural dilemmas of what King terms “the Southern family romance.”
From The Sound and the Fury through the debacle of A Fable, Faulkner cen-
ters upon the sorrows of fathers and sons, to the disadvantage of mothers
and daughters. No feminist critic ever will be happy with Faulkner. His
brooding conviction that female sexuality is closely allied with death seems
essential to all of his strongest fictions. It may even be that Faulkner’s
rhetorical economy, his wounded need to get his cosmos into a single sen-
tence, is related to his fear that origin and end might prove to be one.
Nietzsche prophetically had warned that origin and end were separate enti-
ties, and for the sake of life had to be kept apart, but Faulkner (strangely
like Freud) seems to have known that the only Western trope participating
neither in origin nor end is the image of the father.
By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner now is
recognized as the strongest American novelist of this century, clearly sur-
passing Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and standing as an equal in the
sequence that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain and Henry
James. Some critics might add Dreiser to this group; Faulkner himself curi-
ously would have insisted upon Thomas Wolfe, a generous though dubious
judgment. The American precursor for Faulkner was Sherwood Anderson,

313
314 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

but perhaps only as an impetus; the true American forerunner is the poet-
ry of T.S. Eliot, as Judith L. Sensibar demonstrates. But the truer precur-
sor for Faulkner’s fiction is Conrad, inescapable for the American novelists
of Faulkner’s generation, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Comparison to Conrad is dangerous for any novelist, and clearly Faulkner
did not achieve a Nostromo. But his work of the decade 1929–39 does
include four permanent books: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! If one adds Sanctuary and The Wild
Palms, and The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses in the early forties, then the
combined effect is extraordinary.
From Malcolm Cowley on, critics have explained this effect as the
consequence of the force of mythmaking, at once personal and local.
Cleanth Brooks, the rugged final champion of the New Criticism, essen-
tially reads Faulkner as he does Eliot’s The Waste Land, finding the hidden
God of the normative Christian tradition to be the basis for Faulkner’s atti-
tude towards nature. Since Brooks calls Faulkner’s stance Wordsworthian,
and finds Wordsworthian nature a Christian vision also, the judgment
involved necessarily has its problematical elements. Walter Pater, a critic
in a very different tradition, portrayed a very different Wordsworth in
terms that seem to me not inapplicable to Faulkner:

Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural


regrets of the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for
the perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the cor-
ruption, has always had much to do with localities, with the
thoughts which attach themselves to actual scenes and places.
Now what is true of it everywhere, is truest of it in those seclud-
ed valleys where one generation after another maintains the same
abiding place; and it was on this side, that Wordsworth appre-
hended religion most strongly. Consisting, as it did so much, in
the recognition of local sanctities, in the habit of connecting the
stones and trees of a particular spot of earth with the great events
of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated
epitaphs seemed full of voices, and a sort of natural oracle, the
very religion of those people of the dales, appeared but as anoth-
er link between them and the earth, and was literally a religion of
nature.

A kind of stoic natural religion pervades this description, something


close to the implicit faith of old Isaac McCaslin in Go Down, Moses. It seems
unhelpful to speak of “residual Christianity” in Faulkner, as Cleanth
Novelists and Novels 315

Brooks does. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, in their nostalgias, perhaps were


closer to a Christian ethos than Faulkner was in his great phase. Against
current critical judgment, I prefer As I Lay Dying and Light in August to The
Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! partly because the first two are
more primordial in their vision, closer to the stoic intensities of their
author’s kind of natural piety. There is an otherness in Lena Grove and the
Bundrens that would have moved Wordsworth, that is, the Wordsworth of
The Tale of Margaret, Michael, and The Old Cumberland Beggar. A curious
movement that is also a stasis becomes Faulkner’s pervasive trope for Lena.
Though he invokes the imagery of Keats’s urn, Faulkner seems to have had
the harvest-girl of Keats’s To Autumn more in mind, or even the stately fig-
ures of the Ode to Indolence. We remember Lena Grove as stately, calm, a
person yet a process, a serene and patient consciousness, full of wonder,
too much a unitary being to need even her author’s variety of stoic courage.
The uncanniness of this representation is exceeded by the Bundrens,
whose plangency testifies to Faulkner’s finest rhetorical achievement. As I
Lay Dying may be the most original novel ever written by an American.
Obviously it is not free of the deepest influence Faulkner knew as a novel-
ist. The language is never Conradian, and yet the sense of the reality prin-
ciple is. But there is nothing in Conrad like Darl Bundren, not even in The
Secret Agent. As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s strongest protest against the fac-
ticity of literary convention, against the force of the familial past, which
tropes itself in fiction as the repetitive form of narrative imitating prior
narrative. The book is a sustained nightmare, insofar as it is Darl’s book,
which is to say, Faulkner’s book, or the book of his daemon.

II

Canonization is a process of enshrining creative misinterpretations,


and no one need lament this. Still, one element that ensues from this
process all too frequently is the not very creative misinterpretation in
which the idiosyncratic is distorted into the normative. Churchwardenly
critics who assimilate the Faulkner of the Thirties to spiritual, social, and
moral orthodoxy can and do assert Faulkner himself as their preceptor. But
this is the Faulkner of the Fifties, Nobel laureate, State Department envoy
and author of A Fable, a book of badness simply astonishing for Faulkner.
The best of the normative critics, Cleanth Brooks, reads even As I Lay
Dying as a quest for community, an exaltation of the family, an affirmation
of Christian values. The Bundrens manifestly constitute one of the most
terrifying visions of the family romance in the history of literature. But
their extremism is not eccentric in the 1929–39 world of Faulkner’s fiction.
316 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

That world is founded upon a horror of families, a limbo of outcasts, an


evasion of all values other than stoic endurance. It is a world in which what
is silent in the other Bundrens speaks in Darl, what is veiled in the
Compsons is uncovered in Quentin. So tangled are these returns of the
repressed with what continues to be estranged that phrases like “the viola-
tion of the natural” and “the denial of the human” become quite meaning-
less when applied to Faulkner’s greater fictions. In that world, the natural
is itself a violation and the human already a denial. Is the weird quest of the
Bundrens a violation of the natural, or is it what Blake would have called a
terrible triumph for the selfish virtues of the natural heart? Darl judges it
to be the latter, but Darl luminously denies the sufficiency of the human,
at the cost of what seems schizophrenia.
Marxist criticism of imaginative literature, if it had not regressed
abominably in our country, so that now it is a travesty of the dialectical
suppleness of Adorno and Benjamin, would find a proper subject in the dif-
ficult relationship between the 1929 business panic and As I Lay Dying.
Perhaps the self-destruction of our delusive political economy helped free
Faulkner from whatever inhibitions, communal and personal, had kept
him earlier from a saga like that of the Bundrens. Only an authentic seer
can give permanent form to a prophecy like As I Lay Dying, which puts
severely into question every received notion we have of the natural and the
human. Darl asserts he has no mother, while taunting his enemy brother,
Jewel, with the insistence that Jewel’s mother was a horse. Their little
brother, Vardaman, says: “My mother is a fish.” The mother, dead and
undead, is uncannier even than these children, when she confesses the
truth of her existence, her rejecting vision of her children:

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason
for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I
would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her
single and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood
and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way
I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having
ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they
faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it
upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran,
and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are
aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life,
who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.

This veritable apocalypse of any sense of otherness is no mere “denial


Novelists and Novels 317

of community.” Nor are the Bundrens any “mimesis of essential nature.”


They are a super-mimesis, an over-representation mocking nature while
shadowing it. What matters in major Faulkner is that the people have gone
back, not to nature but to some abyss before the Creation-Fall. Eliot insist-
ed that Joyce’s imagination was eminently orthodox. This can be doubted,
but in Faulkner’s case there is little sense in baptizing his imagination. One
sees why he preferred reading the Old Testament to the New, remarking
that the former was stories and the latter, ideas. The remark is inadequate
except insofar as it opposes Hebraic to Hellenistic representation of char-
acter. There is little that is Homeric about the Bundrens, or Sophoclean
about the Compsons. Faulkner’s irony is neither classical nor romantic,
neither Greek nor German. It does not say one thing while meaning
another, nor trade in contrasts between expectation and fulfillment.
Instead, it juxtaposes incommensurable realities: of self and other, of par-
ent and child, of past and future. When Gide maintained that Faulkner’s
people lacked souls, he simply failed to observe that Faulkner’s ironies were
Biblical. To which an amendment must be added. In Faulkner, only the
ironies are Biblical. What Faulkner’s people lack is the blessing; they can-
not contend for a time without boundaries. Yahweh will make no covenant
with them. Their agon therefore is neither the Greek one for the foremost
place nor the Hebrew one for the blessing, which honors the father and the
mother. Their agon is the hopeless one of waiting for their doom to lift.

The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury always moved Faulkner to tenderness, far more
than his other novels. It was for him a kind of Keatsian artifact, vase or urn
invested with a permanent aesthetic dignity. His judgment has prevailed
with his critics, though some doubts and reservations have been voiced.
Like Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury seems to me a lesser work
than Light in August, or than As I Lay Dying, which is Faulkner’s master-
work. The mark of Joyce’s Ulysses is a little too immediate on The Sound and
the Fury, which does not always sustain its intense rhetoricity, its anguished
word-consciousness. There is something repressed almost throughout The
Sound and the Fury, some autobiographical link between Quentin’s passion
for his sister Caddy and a nameless passion of Faulkner’s, perhaps (as David
Minter surmises) for the sister he never had, perhaps his desire for Estelle
Oldham, later to be his wife, but only after being married to another.
Jealousy, intimately allied to the fear of mortality, is a central element in
The Sound and the Fury.
Hugh Kenner, comparing Faulkner’s novel to its precursors by Conrad
318 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

and Joyce, dismisses the Compson family saga as excessively arty. The
judgment is cruel, yet cogent if Joyce and Conrad are brought too close,
and Faulkner does not distance himself enough from them. This makes for
an unhappy paradox; The Sound and the Fury is a little too elaborately
wrought to sustain its rather homely substance, its plot of family disasters.
But that substance, those familial disorders, are entirely too available to
Freudian and allied reductions; such repetitions and doublings are preva-
lent patterns, vicissitudes of drives too dismally universal truly to serve
novelistic ends. Only Jason, of all the Compsons, is individual enough to
abide as an image in the reader’s memory. His Dickensian nastiness makes
Jason an admirable caricature, while Quentin, Caddy, and Benjy blend into
the continuum, figures of thought for whom Faulkner has failed to find the
inevitable figures of speech.
Faulkner’s Appendix for The Sound and the Fury, written for Malcolm
Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner, not only has become part of the novel, but
famously constitutes the definitive interpretation of the novel, or
Faulkner’s will-to-power over his own text. The Appendix is very much
Faulkner the yarn-spinner of 1946, soon to write such feebler works as
Intruder in the Dust, Knight’s Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun, before col-
lapsing into the disaster of A Fable. It is not the Faulkner of 1928, com-
mencing his major phase, and yet the Appendix does have a curious rhetor-
ical authority, culminating in Faulkner’s tribute to the blacks (after simply
listing Dilsey’s name, since she is beyond praise): “They endured.” Sadly,
this is an authority mostly lacking in the actual text of The Sound and the
Fury. Quentin’s voice makes me start when it is too clearly the voice of
Stephen Daedalus, and Joyce’s medley of narrative voices fades in and out
of Faulkner’s story with no clear relation to Faulkner’s purposes. Only
Poldy, fortunately, is kept away, for his sublime presence would be sub-
limely irrelevant and so would sink the book.
I emphasize the limitations of The Sound and the Fury only because we
are in danger of overlooking them, now that Faulkner has become, right-
ly, our canonical novelist in this century, clearly our strongest author of
prose fiction since the death of Henry James. As I Lay Dying was a radical
experiment that worked magnificently; its forms and voices are apposite
metaphors for the fierce and terrifying individualities of the Bundrens. The
Sound and the Fury was also a remarkable experiment, but too derivative
from Joyce’s Ulysses, and perhaps too dark for Faulkner’s own comfort.
What saves the Compson saga is that it is a saga; and finds a redeem-
ing context in the reader’s sense of larger significances that always seem to
pervade Faulkner’s major writings. We read The Sound and the Fury and we
hear a tale signifying a great deal, because Faulkner constitutes for us a
Novelists and Novels 319

literary cosmos of continual reverberations. Like Dilsey, we too are per-


suaded that we have seen the first and the last, the beginning and the end-
ing of a story that transcends the four Compson children, and the squalors
of their family romance.

Sanctuary

In Sanctuary, no one even bothers to wait for doom to lift; the novel is as
nihilistic as John Webster’s The White Devil or Cyril Tourneur’s The
Atheist’s Tragedy. Malraux asserted that Greek tragedy entered the detec-
tive story in Sanctuary. Had Malraux spoken of Jacobean tragedy, his
remarks would have been to some purpose. Though directly influenced by
Conrad and Dostoevsky, Sanctuary comes closer to Webster and Tourneur
than T.S. Eliot does, even when he explicitly imitates them. Robert Penn
Warren, much under Faulkner’s influence (and Eliot’s), is the other mod-
ern writer who unmistakably reminds us of the Jacobeans. Tragic farce is
the true Jacobean mode, and the mixed genre of Sanctuary—Gothic
thriller, detective and gangster story, shocker, entertainment—quite accu-
rately can be termed tragic farce.
Sanctuary is the enigma among Faulkner’s novels; intended as a pot-
boiler and moneymaker, it very nearly achieves major status and can sus-
tain many rereadings. Its protagonists, like Webster’s, designedly resist
psychologizing. Sanctuary’s extraordinary humor and what might be called
a grotesque assortment of eloquences in Faulkner’s rhetoric, high and low,
combine to keep the book alive in the memory of the reader. Famous pas-
sages at its start and its conclusion remain remarkable as epiphanies—
Paterian, Conradian, Joycean—in which spiritual realities flare forth
against mundane backgrounds. Here is the novel’s opening:

From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring,


Popeye watched the man drinking. A faint path led from the road
to the spring. Popeye watched the man—a tall, thin man, hatless,
in worn gray flannel trousers and carrying a tweed coat over his
arm—emerge from the path and kneel to drink from the spring.
The spring welled up at the root of a beech tree and flowed
away upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. It was surround-
ed by a thick growth of cane and brier, of cypress and gum in
which broken sunlight lay sourceless. Somewhere, hidden and
secret yet nearby, a bird sang three notes and ceased.
In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken
and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he
320 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye’s straw hat,


though he had heard no sound.
He saw, facing him across the spring, a man of under size, his
hands in his coat pockets, a cigarette slanted from his chin. His
suit was black, with a tight, high-waisted coat. His trousers were
rolled once and caked with mud above mud-caked shoes. His face
had a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light;
against the sunny silence, in his slanted straw hat and his slightly
akimbo arms, he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.
Behind him the bird sang again, three bars in monotonous rep-
etition: a sound meaningless and profound out of a suspirant and
peaceful following silence which seemed to isolate the spot, and
out of which a moment later came the sound of an automobile
passing along a road and dying away.

No reader is going to become at ease with Popeye (Faulkner thought


him a monster, but sympathized with him anyway) and no reader forgets
him either. I recall Faulkner’s observation somewhere that his Popeye, in
the movies, ought to be played by Mickey Mouse, a rather more amiable
cartoon than Popeye constitutes. Popeye is nightmare, as this opening pas-
sage conveys; he is a phantasmagoria of flesh illuminated by electric light,
a two-dimensional figure stamped out of tin. We are not surprised that his
sexual organ pragmatically should be a corncob, or that he passively allows
himself to be executed at the book’s close. He represents not a dualism,
whether Platonic or Freudian, but a monistic nihilism, a machine unin-
habited by a ghost. The bird, singing from its hidden and secret recess
nearby, is part of that nihilism, “in monotonous repetition: a sound mean-
ingless and profound.” Perhaps by way of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Faulkner
returns us to the great American trope of a hidden bird singing from a dark
and secret place in a swamp, Whitman’s hermit thrush in When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Whitman’s bird sang a song of sane and sacred
death; the bird of Popeye’s epiphany might as well be a clock, sounding the
repetitions for death in Sanctuary, insane and obscene death.
The impressionism of Sanctuary derives from Conrad, almost as
though Sanctuary is Conrad’s Chance gone mad. Sanctuary will not sustain
aesthetic comparison with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, but there are spiritu-
al and structural affinities between the two novels. Faulkner’s detachment
in Sanctuary is astonishing and empties out the book with high deliberate-
ness. Against Cleanth Brooks, I must assert that there is no Vision of Evil
in Sanctuary. A narrative whose central protagonists are Popeye and
Temple Drake, not Horace Benbow and Ruby Lamar, knows itself too well
Novelists and Novels 321

to desire any pandering to moral judgments. Popeye is a mechanical jack-


in-the-box; Temple ends as a mechanical figurine in Sanctuary’s concluding
passage:

It had been a gray day, a gray summer, a gray year. On the street
old men wore overcoats, and in the Luxembourg Gardens as
Temple and her father passed the women sat knitting in shawls
and even the men playing croquet played in coats and capes, and
in the sad gloom of the chestnut trees the dry click of balls, the
random shouts of children, had that quality of autumn, gallant and
evanescent and forlorn. From beyond the circle with its spurious
Greek balustrade, clotted with movement, filled with a gray light
of the same color and texture as the water which the fountain
played into the pool, came a steady crash of music. They went on,
passed the pool where the children and an old man in a shabby
brown overcoat sailed toy boats, and entered the trees again and
found seats. Immediately an old woman came with decrepit
promptitude and collected four sous.
In the pavilion a band in the horizon blue of the army played
Massenet and Scriabine, and Berlioz like a thin coating of tortured
Tschaikovsky on a slice of stale bread, while the twilight dissolved
in wet gleams from the branches, onto the pavilion and the som-
bre toadstools of umbrellas. Rich and resonant the brasses crashed
and died in the thick green twilight, rolling over them in rich sad
waves. Temple yawned behind her hand, then she took out a com-
pact and opened it upon a face in miniature sullen and discon-
tented and sad. Beside her her father sat, his hands crossed on the
head of his stick, the rigid bar of his moustache beaded with mois-
ture like frosted silver. She closed the compact and from beneath
her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of
music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the
opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead
tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying
prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and
death.

This high rhetoric is as much a failure as the book’s opening passage


was a success. Faulkner, self-consciously invading the ambiance of
Hemingway and Fitzgerald, is anxious and over-writes. He ought to have
ended Sanctuary with the hanging of Popeye, affectless and economical.
We are embarrassed by that “sky lying prone and vanquished in the
322 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

embrace of the season of rain and death,” partly because the sky there is a
trope substituting for the violated sanctuary of Temple’s body. Sanctuary
does not share the strength of Faulkner’s best work, As I Lay Dying and
Light in August, but I perversely prefer it to The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom, Absalom! It lacks their aspirations and their pretensions, and may
in time seem a more original work than either. Its uneven and conflicting
rhetorics wound it, but it survives as narrative and as fearsome image, still
representative of American realities after more than a half-century.

Light in August

There are exceptions to the ironic laws of tragic farce even in Faulkner, by
which I mean major Faulkner, 1928–1942. The Faulkner of the later for-
ties and the fifties, author of A Fable and other inadequate narratives, had
been abandoned by the vision of the abyss that had given him As I Lay
Dying and Sanctuary. But even in his fourteen years of nihilistic splendor,
he had invented a few beings whose mythic sense of persistence conveys a
sense of the biblical blessing. I have already remarked on Lena Grove’s
stately role as a version of the harvest-girl in Keats’s To Autumn. Rather
than discuss Joe Christmas or Joanna Burden or Hightower, I will center
only upon Lena, a vision Wordsworthian and Keatsian, and more satisfy-
ing as such than anything akin to her since George Eliot and Thomas
Hardy.
One way of seeing the particular strength of Light in August as against
Faulkner’s other major novels is to speculate as to which could contain
Lena. Her massively persuasive innocence hardly could be introduced into
The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!, and would destroy utterly As
I Lay Dying or Sanctuary. Natural sublimity, Wordsworthian and almost
Tolstoyan, requires a large cosmos if it is to be sustained. As I Lay Dying is
Faulkner’s most original fiction and my own favorite among all modern
American narratives, yet Light in August must be Faulkner’s grandest
achievement. The book’s ability to hold Lena as well as Joe, Joanna, and
Hightower, makes it the American novel of this century, fit heir of
Melville, Hawthorne, Mark Twain. Difficult as it is to imagine Henry
James getting through Light in August (after all, he had trouble with
Dickens!), the book might have shown James again some possibilities that
he had excluded.
Albert J. Guerard, perhaps too absorbed in tracing Faulkner’s indu-
bitable misogyny, assimilated Lena to “the softer menace of the fecund and
the bovine,” but offered as evidence only that “she is, at her best, a serene-
ly comic creation.” Fecund certainly, bovine certainly not, and to “serene-
Novelists and Novels 323

ly” add the further modifier “loving.” Judith Bryant Wittenberg, in her
feminist consideration of Faulkner, startles me by linking Lena Grove to
Joe Christmas, because they “are both products of an exploited childhood
now restlessly on the move and aggressive in different ways.” Rather, Lena
is never-resting, Joe is restless; Joe is aggressive, but Lena moves on, a nat-
ural force, innocent and direct but free of the death drive, which is incar-
nated in Joe, Joanna, and so many others in the novel.
John T. Irwin, keen seer of repetition and revenge in Faulkner, inti-
mates that the association of Lena with Keats’s Grecian Urn necessarily
links her also to Faulkner’s consciousness of his own mortality and to his
acceptance of his own writing as a form of dying. Nevertheless, Lena is
certainly one of the most benign visions of a reality principle imaginable,
and I return to my own Paterian conviction that she resembles the cre-
ations of Pater’s Wordsworth more than the figures of Keats’s tragic natu-
ralism. Lena may be a projection of comic pastoral, but she seems to me
more pastoral than comic, and an image of natural goodness invested by
Faulkner’s genius with considerable aesthetic dignity.
What would Light in August be like without her? The story of Joe
Christmas and Joanna is almost unrelievedly bitter, though redeemed by
its extraordinary social poignance. Hightower is a superb representation of
Southern Romanticism destroying itself, while generating a great music
from the destruction. What was strongest and clearest in Faulkner’s narra-
tive imagination prompted him to place Lena, who gives us a sense of time
without boundaries, at the visionary center of the novel. She hardly unifies
the book, but Light in August has an exuberant abundance that can dispense
with an overt unity. Lena will be “light in August,” when her child is born,
but she is most of the light that the novel possesses throughout. Perhaps
she is the answer, in Faulkner, to the poet’s old prayer: “make my dark
poem light.”

Absalom, Absalom!

In a cosmos where only the ironies are biblical, the self, like the father and
the past, becomes what Nietzsche called a “numinous shadow,” an ances-
tor rather than a personal possession. Where the self is so estranged, we
are not on Shakespeare’s stage but on John Webster’s, so that the Thomas
Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! is in some respects another Jacobean hero-vil-
lain who would end by saying (if he could), “I limned this night-piece, and
it was my best.” Absalom, Absalom! is a tragic farce, like The White Devil,
and shares in some of the formal difficulties that are endemic in tragic
farce. Rather than add to the distinguished discourse on the narrative
324 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

perplexities that figure so richly in Absalom, Absalom!, I wish to address the


question of comparative value. Does the novel have the aesthetic dignity
that justifies its problematic form, or have we canonized it prematurely?
For reasons that I do not altogether comprehend, Absalom, Absalom!
seems to me a less original book than the three great novels by Faulkner
that preceded it: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August.
The precursors—Conrad profoundly, Joyce, Eliot, and even Tennyson
more superficially—manifest themselves in Faulkner’s text more overtly
than they do in the three earlier works. One misses also the intensely sym-
pathetic figures—Dilsey, Darl Bundren, Lena Grove—and their dreadful
obverses Jason Compson, Addie Bundren, Percy Grimm—who help make
the three earlier masterpieces so memorable. A shadow falls upon
Faulkner’s originality, both of style and of representation, in Absalom,
Absalom! Can that shadow be named?
There seems to be an element of obscurantism in Absalom, Absalom!,
even as there is in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I do not find any obscuran-
tism in As I Lay Dying or Light in August, even as Nostromo and Victory seem
to be free of it. It hovers uneasily in The Sound and the Fury as it does in
Lord Jim, yet it scarcely mars those books. Sometimes in Absalom, as in
Heart of Darkness, I lose confidence that the author knows precisely what
he is talking about. The consequence is a certain bathos which necessarily
diminishes the aesthetic dignity of the work:

“ ‘ You see, I had a design in my mind. Whether it was a good or a


bad design is beside the point; the question is, Where did I make
the mistake in it, what did I do or misdo in it, whom or what injure
by it to the extent which this would indicate. I had a design. To
accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves,
a family—incidentally of course, a wife. I set out to acquire these,
asking no favor of any man. I even risked my life at one time, as I
told you, though as I also told you I did not undertake this risk
purely and simply to gain a wife, though it did have that result.
But that is beside the point also: suffice that I had the wife, accept-
ed her in good faith, with no reservations about myself, and I
expected as much from them. I did not even demand, mind, as one
of my obscure origin might have been expected to do (or at least
be condoned in the doing) out of ignorance of gentility in dealing
with gentleborn people. I did not demand; I accepted them at
their own valuation while insisting on my own part upon explain-
ing fully about myself and my progenitors: yet they deliberately
withheld from me the one fact which I have reason to know they
Novelists and Novels 325

were aware would have caused me to decline the entire matter,


otherwise they would not have withheld it from me—a fact which
I did not learn until after my son was born. And even then I did
not act hastily. I could have reminded them of these wasted years,
these years which would now leave me behind with my schedule
not only the amount of elapsed time which their number repre-
sented, but that compensatory amount of time represented by
their number which I should now have to spend to advance myself
once more to the point I had reached and lost. But I did not. I
merely explained how this new fact rendered it impossible that
this woman and child be incorporated in my design, and follow-
ing which, as I told you, I made no attempt to keep not only that
which I might consider myself to have earned at the risk of my life
but which had been given to me by signed testimonials, but on the
contrary I declined and resigned all right and claim to this in order
that I might repair whatever injustice I might be considered to
have done by so providing for the two persons whom I might be
considered to have deprived of anything I might later possess: and
this was agreed to, mind; agreed to between the two parties. And
yet, and after more than thirty years, more than thirty years after
my conscience had finally assured me that if I had done an injus-
tice, I had done what I could to rectify it—’ and Grandfather not
saying ‘Wait’ now but saying, hollering maybe even: ‘Conscience?
Conscience? Good God, man, what else did you expect? Didn’t
the very affinity and instinct for misfortune of a man who had
spent that much time in a monastery even, let alone one who had
lived that many years as you lived them, tell you better than that?
didn’t the dread and fear of females which you must have drawn
in with the primary mammalian milk teach you better? What kind
of abysmal and purblind innocence could that have been which
someone told you to call virginity? what conscience to trade with
which would have warranted you in the belief that you could have
bought immunity from her for no other coin but justice?’—”

This is Sutpen, as reported by Quentin’s Grandfather, and ends with


the latter admonishing Sutpen. For the rhetoric here of both men not to
seem excessive, Sutpen must be of some eminence and his “design” of
some consequence. But nothing in the novel persuades one of Sutpen’s
stature or of his design’s meaningfulness. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness,
Sutpen is a blind will in a cognitive vacuum; both figures seem to represent
nothing more than a Nietzschean spirit of mere resentment, rather than
326 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the will’s deep revenge against time, and time’s “It was.” Faulkner evident-
ly was persuaded of Sutpen’s importance, if only as a vital synecdoche for
southern history. More a process than a man, Sutpen has drive without
personality. One can remember a few of his acts, but none of his words, let
alone his thoughts—if he has thoughts. He is simply too abrupt a mythic
representation, rather than a man who becomes a myth. Only the scope of
his failure interests Faulkner, rather than anything he is or means as a per-
son.
Good critics confronting Absalom, Absalom! are fascinated by its intri-
cate and enormous narrative procedures and by its genealogical patterns:
doubling, incest, repetition, revenge—as John Irwin catalogs them. But
narrative complications and structures of human desire, however titanic,
are not necessarily aesthetic achievements. The Johnsonian questions,
decisive for the common reader, always remain: how significant is the
action that is represented, and how persuasive is the representation of the
actors? Abstractly, the founding of a house and clan ought to outweigh the
lunatic quest to bury a bad mother in the face of appalling obstacles, and
yet Faulkner fails to make the former project as vital as the latter. Sutpen’s
design does not in itself move me, while the Bundrens’ journey never loses
its capacity to shock me into a negative Sublime. As a minority of one (so
far as I can tell), I would yield to other critics on the greatness of Absalom,
Absalom!, except that the best of them simply assume the eminence and
mythic splendor of the book.
Time may reveal such assumptions to be accurate and thus justify
readings that take delight in aspects of the book that make it more prob-
lematic than nearly any other comparable novel. Still, Faulkner’s A Fable,
surely his worst book by any critical standards, will sustain post-
Structuralist readings almost as well as Absalom, Absalom! does. Perhaps
Faulkner’s most comprehensive and ambitious novel justifies its vast inclu-
siveness that is so uneasily allied to its deliberately unfinished quality. But
Sutpen is indeed more like Conrad’s Kurtz than like Melville’s Ahab, in
that his obsessions are not sufficiently metaphysical. Sutpen’s Hundred is
too much Kurtz’s Africa, and too little the whiteness of the whale.
N O V E L I S T S
Ernest Hemingway

A N D
(1899–1961)

N O V E L S
I

HEMINGWAY FREELY PROCLAIMED HIS RELATIONSHIP TO HUCKLEBERRY


Finn, and there is some basis for the assertion, except that there is little in
common between the rhetorical stances of Twain and Hemingway.
Kipling’s Kim, in style and mode, is far closer to Huckleberry Finn than any-
thing Hemingway wrote. The true accent of Hemingway’s admirable style
is to be found in an even greater and more surprising precursor:

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

Or again:

I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore drips, thinn’d with the ooze
of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with
whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the
wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

Hemingway is scarcely unique in not acknowledging the paternity of

327
328 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Walt Whitman; T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are far closer to Whitman
than William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane were, but literary influence
is a paradoxical and antithetical process, about which we continue to know
all too little. The profound affinities between Hemingway, Eliot, and
Stevens are not accidental, but are family resemblances due to the
repressed but crucial relation each had to Whitman’s work. Hemingway
characteristically boasted (in a letter to Sara Murphy, February 72, 1936)
that he had knocked Stevens down quite handily: “... for statistics sake Mr.
Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 522 lbs. and ... when he hits the ground it is high-
ly spectaculous.” Since this match between the two writers took place in
Key West on February 19, 1936, I am moved, as a loyal Stevensian, for sta-
tistics’ sake to point out that the victorious Hemingway was born in 1899,
and the defeated Stevens in 1879, so that the novelist was then going on
thirty-seven, and the poet verging on fifty-seven. The two men doubtless
despised one another, but in the letter celebrating his victory Hemingway
calls Stevens “a damned fine poet” and Stevens always affirmed that
Hemingway was essentially a poet, a judgment concurred in by Robert
Penn Warren when he wrote that Hemingway “is essentially a lyric rather
than a dramatic writer.” Warren compared Hemingway to Wordsworth,
which is feasible, but the resemblance to Whitman is far closer.
Wordsworth would not have written, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was
there,” but Hemingway almost persuades us he would have achieved that
line had not Whitman set it down first.

II

It is now more than twenty years since Hemingway’s suicide, and some
aspects of his permanent canonical status seem beyond doubt. Only a few
modern American novels seem certain to endure: The Sun Also Rises, The
Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49, and at least several by
Faulkner, including As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, The Sound
and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! Two dozen stories by Hemingway could be
added to the group, indeed perhaps all of The First Forty-Nine Stories.
Faulkner is an eminence apart, but critics agree that Hemingway and
Fitzgerald are his nearest rivals, largely on the strength of their shorter fic-
tion. What seems unique is that Hemingway is the only American writer
of prose fiction in this century who, as a stylist, rivals the principal poets:
Stevens, Eliot, Frost, Hart Crane, aspects of Pound, W.C. Williams,
Robert Penn Warren, and Elizabeth Bishop. This is hardly to say that
Hemingway, at his best, fails at narrative or the representation of charac-
ter. Rather, his peculiar excellence is closer to Whitman than to Twain,
Novelists and Novels 329

closer to Stevens than to Faulkner, and even closer to Eliot than to


Fitzgerald, who was his friend and rival. He is an elegiac poet who mourns
the self, who celebrates the self (rather less effectively) and who suffers
divisions in the self. In the broadest tradition of American literature, he
stems ultimately from the Emersonian reliance on the god within, which
is the line of Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson. He arrives late and dark
in this tradition, and is one of its negative theologians, as it were, but as in
Stevens the negations, the cancellings, are never final. Even the most fero-
cious of his stories, say “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” or “A Natural
History of the Dead,” can be said to celebrate what we might call the Real
Absence. Doc Fischer, in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” is a precur-
sor of Nathanael West’s Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts, and his savage, implic-
it religiosity prophesies not only Shrike’s Satanic stance but the entire
demonic world of Pynchon’s explicitly paranoid or Luddite visions.
Perhaps there was a nostalgia for a Catholic order always abiding in
Hemingway’s consciousness, but the cosmos of his fiction, early and late,
is American Gnostic, as it was in Melville, who first developed so strongly
the negative side of the Emersonian religion of self-reliance.

III

Hemingway notoriously and splendidly was given to overtly agonistic


images whenever he described his relationship to canonical writers, includ-
ing Melville, a habit of description in which he has been followed by his
true ephebe, Norman Mailer. In a grand letter (September 6–7, 1949) to
his publisher, Charles Scribner, he charmingly confessed, “Am a man with-
out any ambition, except to be champion of the world, I wouldn’t fight Dr.
Tolstoi in a 20 round bout because I know he would knock my ears off.”
This modesty passed quickly, to be followed by, “If I can live to 60 I can
beat him. (MAYBE).” Since the rest of the letter counts Turgenev, de
Maupassant, Henry James, even Cervantes, as well as Melville and
Dostoyevski, among the defeated, we can join Hemingway, himself, in
admiring his extraordinary self-confidence. How justified was it, in terms
of his ambitions?
It could be argued persuasively that Hemingway is the best short-story
writer in the English language from Joyce’s Dubliners until the present.
The aesthetic dignity of the short story need not be questioned, and yet we
seem to ask more of a canonical writer. Hemingway wrote The Sun Also
Rises and not Ulysses, which is only to say that his true genius was for very
short stories, and hardly at all for extended narrative. Had he been prima-
rily a poet, his lyrical gifts would have sufficed: we do not hold it against
330 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Yeats that his poems, not his plays, are his principal glory. Alas, neither
Turgenev nor Henry James, neither Melville nor Mark Twain provide true
agonists for Hemingway. Instead, de Maupassant is the apter rival. Of
Hemingway’s intensity of style in the briefer compass, there is no question,
but even The Sun Also Rises reads now as a series of epiphanies, of brilliant
and memorable vignettes.
Much that has been harshly criticized in Hemingway, particularly in
For Whom the Bell Tolls, results from his difficulty in adjusting his gifts to
the demands of the novel. Robert Penn Warren suggests that Hemingway
is successful when his “system of ironies and understatements is coherent.”
When incoherent, then, Hemingway’s rhetoric fails as persuasion, which is
to say, we read To Have and Have Not or For Whom the Bell Tolls and we are
all too aware that the system of tropes is primarily what we are offered.
Warren believes this not to be true of A Farewell to Arms, yet even the cel-
ebrated close of the novel seems now a worn understatement:

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the
light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to
the hotel in the rain.

Contrast this to the close of “Old Man at the Bridge,” a story only two
and a half pages long:

There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the
Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast
day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the
fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good
luck that old man would ever have.

The understatement continues to persuade here because the stoicism


remains coherent, and is admirably fitted by the rhetoric. A very short
story concludes itself by permanently troping the mood of a particular
moment in history. Vignette is Hemingway’s natural mode, or call it hard-
edged vignette: a literary sketch that somehow seems to be the beginning
or end of something longer, yet truly is complete in itself. Hemingway’s
style encloses what ought to be unenclosed, so that the genre remains sub-
tle yet trades its charm for punch. But a novel of three hundred and forty
pages (A Farewell to Arms) which I have just finished reading again (after
twenty years away from it) cannot sustain itself upon the rhetoric of
vignette. After many understatements, too many, the reader begins to
Novelists and Novels 331

believe that he is reading a Hemingway imitator, like the accomplished


John O’Hara, rather than the master himself. Hemingway’s notorious fault
is the monotony of repetition, which becomes a dulling litany in a some-
what less accomplished imitator like Nelson Algren, and sometimes seems
self-parody when we must confront it in Hemingway.
Nothing is got for nothing, and a great style generates defenses in us,
particularly when it sets the style of an age, as the Byronic Hemingway did.
As with Byron, the color and variety of the artist’s life becomes something
of a veil between the work and our aesthetic apprehension of it.
Hemingway’s career included four marriages (and three divorces); service
as an ambulance driver for the Italians in World War I (with an honorable
wound); activity as a war correspondent in the Greek-Turkish War (1922),
the Spanish Civil War (1937–39), the Chinese-Japanese War (1941) and
the War against Hitler in Europe (1944–45). Add big-game hunting and
fishing, safaris, expatriation in France and Cuba, bullfighting, the Nobel
prize, and ultimate suicide in Idaho, and you have an absurdly implausible
life, apparently lived in imitation of Hemingway’s own fiction. The final
effect of the work and the life together is not less than mythological, as it
was with Byron and with Whitman and with Oscar Wilde. Hemingway
now is myth, and so is permanent as an image of American heroism, or
perhaps more ruefully the American illusion of heroism. The best of
Hemingway’s work, the stories and The Sun Also Rises, are also a permanent
part of the American mythology. Faulkner, Stevens, Frost, perhaps Eliot,
and Hart Crane were stronger writers than Hemingway, but he alone in
this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth.

The Sun Also Rises

Rereading The Sun Also Rises provides a few annoyances, particularly if one
is a Jewish literary critic and somewhat skeptical of Hemingway’s vision of
the matador as messiah. Romero seems to me about as convincing a rep-
resentation as Robert Cohn; they are archetypes for Hemingway in 1926,
but hardly for us sixty years after. Brett and Mike are period pieces also;
Scott Fitzgerald did them better. But these are annoyances only; the novel
is as fresh now as when I first read it in 1946 when I was sixteen. Like The
Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises ages beautifully. Why? What are the qual-
ities that save this novel from its own mystique, its self-intoxication with its
own rhetorical stance? What does it share with Hemingway’s best stories,
like those in the fine collection Winner Take Nothing?
A great style is itself necessarily a trope, a metaphor for a particular
attitude towards reality. Hemingway’s is an art of evocation, hardly a
332 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

singular or original mode, except that Hemingway evokes by parataxis, in


the manner of Whitman, or of much in the English Bible. This is parataxis
with a difference, a way of utterance that plays at a withdrawal from all
affect, while actually investing affect in the constancy of the withdrawal, a
willing choice of the void as object, rather than be void of object, in
Nietzschean terms. Not that Hemingway is spurred by Nietzsche, since
Conrad is clearly the largest precursor of the author of The Sun Also Rises.
The stance of Marlow in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness is the closest ana-
logue to Hemingway’s own rhetorical stance in The Sun Also Rises and A
Farewell to Arms.
Erich Auerbach and Angus Fletcher are among the notable modern
critics who have illuminated the literary uses of parataxis. Fletcher lucidly
summarizes parataxis as a syntactic parallel to the symbolic action of liter-
ature:

This term implies a structuring of sentences such that they do not


convey any distinctions of higher or lower order. “Order” here
means intensity of interest, since what is more important usually
gets the greater share of attention.

Fletcher, without implying childlike or primitive behavior, indicates


the psychological meaning of parataxis as being related to “the piecemeal
behavior of young children or primitive peoples.” As Fletcher notes, this
need not involve the defense Freud named as regression, because a parat-
actic syntax “displays ambiguity, suggesting that there is a rhythmic order
even deeper in its organizing force than the syntactic order.”
Hemingway’s parataxis is worthy of the full-length studies it has not
yet received. Clearly it is akin to certain moments in Huck Finn’s narra-
tion, Walt Whitman’s reveries, and even Wallace Stevens’s most sustained
late meditations, such as The Auroras of Autumn. John Hollander usefully
compares it also to “an Antonioni shooting script in the relation of dia-
logue and shots of landscape cut away to as a move in the dialogue itself,
rather than as mere punctuation, and ultimately in the way in which dia-
logue and uninterpreted glimpse of scene interpret each other.” I take it
that the refusal of emphasis, the maintaining of an even tonality of appar-
ent understatement, is the crucial manifestation of parataxis in
Hemingway’s prose style. Consider the celebrated conclusion of The Sun
Also Rises:

Down-stairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to


the street. A waiter went for a taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the
Novelists and Novels 333

street was a little square with trees and grass where there were
taxis parked. A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at
the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got
in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back.
Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my
arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very
hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned
out onto the Gran Via.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned
good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic.
He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett
against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

The question of Jakes’ impotence is more than relevant here. It is well


to remember Hemingway’s description of authorial intention, given in the
interview with George Plimpton:

Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his tes-
ticles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all
normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them.
The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not
psychological and that he was not emasculated.

The even, understated tone at the end of The Sun Also Rises depends
upon a syntax that carries parataxis to what might have been parodistic
excess, if Hemingway’s art were less deliberate. Sentences such as “It was
hot and bright” and the sly “He raised his baton” are psychic images of lost
consummation, but they testify also to Jake’s estrangement from the earli-
er intensities of his love for Brett. Reduced by his betrayal of the matador-
messiah to Brett’s rapacity, Jake is last heard in transition towards a less
childlike, less primitive mode of reality-testing: “ ‘ Yes.’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pret-
ty to think so?’ ” One remembers Nietzsche’s reflection that what we find
words for is something we already despise in our hearts, so that there is
always a sort of contempt in the act of speaking. Kenneth Burke, in
Counter-Statement, rejoined that the contempt might be in the act, but not
contempt for speaking. Jake, as the novel ends, is in transition towards
Burke’s position.
Hemingway possessed both a great style and an important sensibility.
He was not an original moralist, a major speculative intellect, a master of
334 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

narrative, or superbly gifted in the representation of persons. That is to


say, he was not Tolstoy, whom he hoped to defeat he said, if only he could
live long enough. But style and sensibility can be more than enough, as The
Sun Also Rises demonstrates. Style alone will not do it; consider Updike or
Cheever. We go back to The Sun Also Rises to learn a sensibility and to
modify our own in the process of learning.

A Farewell to Arms

If A Farewell to Arms fails to sustain itself as a unified novel, it does


remain Hemingway’s strongest work after the frequent best of the short
stories and The Sun Also Rises. It also participates in the aura of
Hemingway’s mode of myth, embodying as it does not only Hemingway’s
own romance with Europe but the permanent vestiges of our national
romance with the Old World. The death of Catherine represents not the
end of that affair, but its perpetual recurrence. I assign classic status in
the interpretation of that death to Leslie Fiedler, with his precise knowl-
edge of the limits of literary myth: “Only the dead woman becomes nei-
ther a bore nor a mother; and before Catherine can quite become either
she must die, killed not by Hemingway, of course, but by childbirth!”
Fiedler finds a touch of Poe in this, but Hemingway seems to me far
healthier. Death, to Poe, is after all less a metaphor for sexual fulfillment
than it is an improvement over mere coition, since Poe longs for a union
in essence and not just in act.
Any feminist critic who resents that too-lovely Hemingwayesque end-
ing, in which Frederic Henry gets to walk away in the rain while poor
Catherine takes the death for both of them, has my sympathy, if only
because this sentimentality that mars the aesthetic effect is certainly the
mask for a male resentment and fear of women. Hemingway’s symbolic
rain is read by Louis L. Martz as the inevitable trope for pity, and by
Malcolm Cowley as a conscious symbol for disaster. A darker interpreta-
tion might associate it with Whitman’s very American confounding of
night, death, the mother, and the sea, a fourfold mingling that Whitman
bequeathed to Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, among many
others. The death of the beloved woman in Hemingway is part of that
tropological cosmos, in which the moist element dominates because death
the mother is the true image of desire. For Hemingway, the rain replaces
the sea, and is as much the image of longing as the sea is in Whitman or
Hart Crane.
Robert Penn Warren, defending a higher estimate of A Farewell to
Arms than I can achieve, interprets the death of Catherine as the discovery
Novelists and Novels 335

that “the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited
meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure.” Such a read-
ing, though distinguished, seems to me to belong more to the literary cos-
mos of T.S. Eliot than to that of Hemingway. Whatever nostalgia for
transcendental verities Hemingway may have possessed, his best fiction
invests its energies in the representation of personal relationships, and
hardly with the tendentious design of exposing their inevitable inadequa-
cies. If your personal religion quests for the matador as messiah, then you
are likely to seek in personal relationships something of the same values
enshrined in the ritual of bull and bullfighter: courage, dignity, the aes-
thetic exaltation of the moment, and an all but suicidal intensity of
being—the sense of life gathered to a crowded perception and graciously
open to the suddenness of extinction. That is a vivid but an unlikely sce-
nario for an erotic association, at least for any that might endure beyond
a few weeks.
Wyndham Lewis categorized Hemingway by citing Walter Pater on
Prosper Merimée: “There is the formula ... the enthusiastic amateur of
rude, crude, naked force in men and women.... Painfully distinct in out-
line, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they stand.” Around them,
Pater added, what Merimée gave you was “neither more nor less than
empty space.” I believe that Pater would have found more than that in
Hemingway’s formula, more in the men and women, and something
other than empty space in their ambiance. Perhaps by way of Joseph
Conrad’s influence upon him, Hemingway had absorbed part at least of
what is most meaningful in Pater’s aesthetic impressionism.
Hemingway’s women and men know, with Pater, that we have an inter-
val, and then our place knows us no more. Our one chance is to pack that
interval with the multiplied fruit of consciousness, with the solipsistic
truths of perception and sensation. What survives time’s ravages in A
Farewell to Arms is precisely Hemingway’s textually embodied knowledge
that art alone apprehends the moments of perception and sensation, and
so bestows upon them their privileged status. Consider the opening para-
graph of chapter 16:

That night a bat flew into the room through the open door that led
onto the balcony and through which we watched the night over the
roofs of the town. It was dark in our room except for the small light
of the night over the town and the bat was not frightened but hunt-
ed in the room as though he had been outside. We lay and watched
him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still. After he
went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the beam
336 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

move across the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A breeze
came in the night and we heard the men of the anti-aircraft gun on
the next roof talking. It was cool and they were putting on their
capes. I worried in the night about some one coming up but
Catherine said they were all asleep. Once in the night we went to
sleep and when I woke she was not there but I heard her coming
along the hall and the door opened and she came back to the bed
and said it was all right she had been downstairs and they were all
asleep. She had been outside Miss Van Campen’s door and heard
her breathing in her sleep. She brought crackers and we ate them
and drank some vermouth. We were very hungry but she said that
would all have to be gotten out of me in the morning. I went to
sleep again in the morning when it was light and when I was awake
I found she was gone again. She came in looking fresh and lovely
and sat on the bed and the sun rose while I had the thermometer
in my mouth and we smelled the dew on the roofs and then the
coffee of the men at the gun on the next roof.

The flight of the bat, the movement of the searchlight’s beam and of
the breeze, the overtones of the antiaircraft gunners blend into the light of
the morning, to form a composite epiphany of what it is that Frederic
Henry has lost when he finally walks back to the hotel in the rain. Can we
define that loss? As befits the aesthetic impressionism of Pater, Conrad,
Stephen Crane, and Hemingway, it is in the first place a loss of vividness
and intensity in the world as experienced by the senses. In the aura of his
love for Catherine, Frederic Henry knows the fullness of “It was dark” and
“It was cool,” and the smell of the dew on the roofs, and the aroma of the
coffee being enjoyed by the anti-aircraft gunners. We are reminded that
Pater’s crucial literary ancestors were the unacknowledged Ruskin and the
hedonistic visionary Keats, the Keats of the “Ode on Melancholy.”
Hemingway too, particularly in A Farewell to Arms, is an heir of Keats, with
the poet’s passion for sensuous immediacy, in all of its ultimate implica-
tions. Is not Catherine Barkley a belated and beautiful version of the god-
dess Melancholy, incarnating Keats’s “Beauty that must die”? Hemingway
too exalts that quester after the Melancholy,

whose strenuous tongue


Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Novelists and Novels 337

The Old Man and the Sea

Hemingway’s greatness is in his short stories, which rival any other


master of the form, be it Joyce or Chekhov or Isaak Babel. Of his novels,
one is constrained to suggest reservations, even of the very best: The Sun
Also Rises. The Old Man and the Sea is the most popular of Hemingway’s
later works, but this short novel alas is an indeliberate self-parody, though
less distressingly so than Across the River and Into the Trees, composed just
before it. There is a gentleness, a nuanced tenderness, that saves The Old
Man and the Sea from the self-indulgences of Across the River and Into the
Trees. In an interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway stated his pride
in what he considered to be the aesthetic economy of The Old Man and the
Sea:

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages
long and had every character in the village in it and all the process-
es of the way they made their living, were born, educated, bore
children, etc. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In
writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactori-
ly. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried
to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the
reader so that after he or she has read something it will become
part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened.
This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time


and could convey the experience completely and have it be one
that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good
man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still
are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as a
man is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and known
about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more
than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once har-
pooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that
out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the
iceberg.

The Old Man and the Sea unfortunately is too long, rather than exquis-
itely curtailed, as Hemingway believed. The art of ellipsis, or leaving
things out, indeed is the great virtue of Hemingway’s best short stories. But
The Old Man and the Sea is tiresomely repetitive, and Santiago the old fish-
338 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

erman is too clearly an idealization of Hemingway himself, who thinks in


the style of the novelist attempting to land a great work:

Only I have no luck anymore. But who knows? Maybe today.


Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather
be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Contemplating the big fish, Santiago is even closer to Hemingway the


literary artist, alone with his writerly quest:

His choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond
all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to
find him beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now
we are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to
help either one of us.

Santiago’s ordeal, first in his struggle with the big fish, and then in
fighting against the sharks, is associated by Hemingway with Christ’s
agony and triumph. Since it is so difficult to disentangle Santiago and
Hemingway, this additional identification is rather unfortunate in its aes-
thetic consequences, because it can render a reader rather uncomfortable.
There is a longing or nostalgia for faith in Hemingway, at least from The
Sun Also Rises until the end of his career. But if The Old Man and the Sea is
a Christian allegory, then the book carries more intended significance than
it can bear. The big fish is no Moby-Dick or Jobean adversary; Santiago
loves the fish and sees it as his double. What can we do with Santiago-as-
Christ when we attempt to interpret the huge marlin?
William Faulkner praised The Old Man and the Sea as being
Hemingway’s best work, but then Faulkner also considered Thomas Wolfe
to be the greatest American novelist of the century. The story, far from
Hemingway’s best, cannot be both a parable of Christian redemption and
of a novelist’s triumph, not so much because these are incompatible, but
because so repetitive and self-indulgent a narrative cannot bear that dou-
ble burden. Sentimentality, or emotion in excess of the object, floods The
Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway himself is so moved by Hemingway that
his famous, laconic style yields to uncharacteristic overwriting. We are not
shown “grace under pressure,” but something closer to Narcissus observ-
ing himself in the mirror of the sea.
N O V E L I S T S
Vladimir Nabokov

A N D
(1899–1977)

N O V E L S
Lolita

LOLITA, BAROQUE AND SUBTLE, IS A BOOK WRITTEN TO BE REREAD, BUT


whether its continued force matches the intricacy of its design seems to me
problematic. Little is gained for Nabokov by comparing him to Sterne or
to Joyce. Borges, who was essentially a parodist, is an apter parallel to
Nabokov. Perhaps parodists are fated to resent Sigmund Freud; certainly
Borges and Nabokov are the modern writers who most consistently and
ignorantly abuse Freud.
Where Nabokov hardly can be overpraised is in his achievement as a
stylist. This is one of the endlessly dazzling paragraphs of Lolita:

So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed—and the red sun of


desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose
higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succes-
sion of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past
and future nights. Then, figuratively speaking, I shattered the
glass, and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on those visions by
then and underrated the gentleness of my nature) how eventually
I might blackmail—no, that is too strong a word—mauvemail big
Haze into letting me consort with little Haze by gently threaten-
ing the poor doting Big Dove with desertion if she tried to bar me
from playing with my legal stepdaughter. In a word, before such an
Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was
as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history,
miraged in his apple orchard.

339
340 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

It is a grand prose-poem, and the entire book in little. Reading it aloud


is a shocking pleasure, and analyzing it yet another pleasure, more inward
and enduring. Humbert, more “cubus” than “incubus,” casts the red sun of
his lustful will over the aptly named Haze females, yet avoids incurring our
moral resentment by the exuberance of his language, with its zest for
excess. What could be more captivating and memorable than: “while upon
a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand,
toasted the bliss of past and future nights?” That delicious double “succes-
sion” achieves a kind of higher innocence, insouciant and stylized, delight-
ing more in the language than in the actual possibility of sensual bliss.
Shattering the sparkling glass, Humbert breaks the vessels of reverie in
order to achieve a totally drunken vision of sexual exploitation, indeed like
a new Adam overcome by the fumes of the fruit.
What Nabokov offers, in Ada as well as Lolita, is an almost pure revel
in language, by no means necessarily allied with insight. His loathing of
Freud reduces, I think, to a fear of meaning, to a need to defend against
overdetermined sense, a sense that would extend to everything. Memory,
in Nabokov, fears not so much Oedipal intensities as it does more-than-
Oedipal genealogies. Here, Nabokov compares weakly to Proust, his most
daunting precursor. Lolita gives us Marcel as Humbert and Albertine as
Lolita, which is to replace a sublime temporal pathos by a parodistic cun-
ning that unfortunately keeps reminding us how much we have lost when
we turn from Proust to Nabokov.

II

Early defenses of Lolita by John Hollander and Lionel Trilling cen-


tered upon the insistence that it was an authentic love story. Rereading
Lolita now, when no one would accuse the book of being pornography, I
marvel that acute readers could take it as a portrayal of human love, since
Humbert and Lolita are hardly representations of human beings. They are
deliberate caricatures, as fabulistic as Charlotte Haze and Clare Quilty.
Solipsistic nightmares, they wander in the America of highways and
motels, but would be more at home in Through the Looking-Glass or The
Hunting of the Snark. Poor Lolita indeed is a Snark, who precisely does not
turn out to be a Boojum.
Nabokov, like Borges, is the most literary of fantasists, and takes from
reality only what is already Nabokovian. Jane Austen, a powerful
Protestant will, was as interested in social reality as the compulsive Dreiser
was, but Nabokov’s social reality died forever with the Bolshevik
Revolution. Admirers who defend Nabokov’s writing as mimesis do him
Novelists and Novels 341

violence. His genius was for distorted self-representation. Whether the


Proustian intensities of sexual jealousy lend themselves to the phantas-
magoric mode of Gogol is a considerable question, but Nabokov intrepid-
ly did not wait for an answer.
“So what is that queer world, glimpses of which we keep catching
through the gaps of the harmless looking sentences. It is in a way the real
one but it looks wildly absurd to us, accustomed as we are to the stage set-
ting that screens it.” That is Nabokov on Gogol, or Nabokov on Nabokov.
It is not Humbert on Humbert. Nabokov’s uncanny art refuses identifica-
tion with his protagonist, yet lends the author’s voice to the comically des-
perate pursuer of nymphets. “The science of nympholepsy is a precise sci-
ence,” says Humbert and we reflect that Nabokov is the scientist, rather
than poor Humbert, a reflection that is proved by an even more famous
declaration:

I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can imag-


ine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on:
to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.

Humbert perhaps knows that “the perilous magic” of eroticism cross-


es animality with death; Nabokov certainly knows, though he rejects so
crassly the greatest of modern knowers, Freud. Rejecting Freud however
is not a possible option in our time, and the whole of Part Two of Lolita is
an involuntary repetition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The death drive,
fueled by that negative libido Freud once toyed with calling “destrudo,”
takes over poor Humbert completely, through the agency of his dark dou-
ble and despoiler, Clare Quilty. Refusing to compound with Freud, who is
the greatest and most pervasive of modern imaginations, Nabokov is
doomed merely to repeat the Freudian mythology of the dual drives, Eros-
Humbert and Thanatos-Quilty. All of Part Two of Lolita becomes, not a
parody, but a Freudian allegory, considerably less splendid than the joyous
Part One.
Humbert’s murder of Quilty is at once the most curious and the least
persuasive episode in Lolita. Each figure is the “familiar and innocuous hal-
lucination” of the other, and Humbert’s bungling execution of his double
lifts the book momentarily into the category of nightmare. It is no accident
that Humbert returns to the slain Quilty (C.Q.) in the novel’s closing sen-
tences:

And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H.,
and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer,
342 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.


I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pig-
ments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only
immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

That doesn’t sound to me like Humbert, and rather clearly Nabokov


has usurped these closing tonalities, explaining why he did not have Quilty
murder Humbert, which I suspect would have made a better end. I don’t
hear remoteness in this final tone, but rather an attempt to recover some-
thing of the aura of Part One, so sadly lost in the frenzies of Humbert’s
later sorrows.
N O V E L I S T S
André Malraux

A N D
(1901–1976)

N O V E L S
Man’s Fate

LA CONDITION HUMAINE (1933, KNOWN IN ENGLISH AS MAN’S FATE) IS


judged universally to have been André Malraux’s major novel. Rereading it
in 1987, sixty years after the Shanghai insurrection of 1927, which it com-
memorates, is a rather ambiguous experience. One need not have feared
that it would seem a mere period piece; it is an achieved tragedy, with the
aesthetic dignity that the genre demands. What renders it a little disap-
pointing is its excessive abstractness. Malraux may have known a touch too
clearly exactly what he was doing. Rereading Faulkner always surprises;
there is frequently a grace beyond the reach of art. Malraux’s fictive econ-
omy is admirable, but the results are somewhat schematic. Clarity can be a
novelistic virtue; transparency grieves us with the impression of a certain
thin quality.
The idealistic revolutionaries are persuasive enough in Man’s Fate; they
are even exemplary. But, like all of Malraux’s protagonists, they are dimin-
ished by their sense of coming after their inspirers; they are not forerun-
ners, but belated imitators of the Revolution. Malraux’s protagonists
designedly quest for strength by confronting death, thus achieving differ-
ent degrees either of communion or of solitude. Their models in fiction are
the obsessed beings of Dostoevsky or of Conrad. Man’s Fate cannot sustain
comparison with Nostromo, let alone with the anguished narratives of
Dostoevsky. There are no originals in Malraux, no strong revolutionaries
who are the equivalents of strong poets, rather than of philosophers.
Geoffrey Hartman, defending Malraux’s stature as tragedian, sees the
heroes of Man’s Fate as understanding and humanizing the Nietzschean
Eternal Recurrence:

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344 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The tragic sentiment is evoked most purely not by multiplying


lives ... but by repeating the chances of death, of unique, fatal acts.
A hero like Tchen, or his fellow conspirators Kyo and Katov, dies
more than once.

But is that the Nietzschean issue, the Nietzschean test for strength?
Do Malraux’s heroes take on what Richard Rorty, following Nietzsche, has
called “the contingency of selfhood”? Do they fully appreciate their own
contingency? Here is Rorty’s summary of this crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism:

His perspectivism amounted to the claim that the universe had no


lading-list to be known, of determinate length. He hoped that,
once we realized that Plato’s “true world” was just a fable, we
would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having
transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of
dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had
created himself.

Nietzsche understood that political revolutionaries are more like


philosophers than like poets, since revolutionaries also insist that the
human condition bears only one true analysis. Malraux’s heroes attempt to
escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poets, accepting and
then appropriating contingency. Though the heroes of Man’s Fate, and of
Malraux’s other novels, meditate endlessly upon death, if only in order to
achieve a sense of being, they never succeed in describing themselves
entirely in their own terms. This is a clue to Malraux’s ultimate inadequa-
cy as a novelist, his failure to join himself to the great masters of French
fiction: Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, or to the international novelists
he most admired: Dostoevsky, Conrad, Faulkner. Would we say of the pro-
tagonists of Stendhal and Balzac that the death which overcomes them “is
no more than the symbol of an ultimate self-estrangement”? Hartman’s
remark is valid for Malraux’s heroes, but not for Stendhal’s or Balzac’s.
Malraux, a superb and wary critic, defended himself against Gaëtan
Picon’s shrewd observation that: “Malraux, unlike Balzac or Proust, in no
way seeks to give each character a personal voice, to free each character
from its creator.” His response was: “The autonomy of characters, the par-
ticular vocabulary given to each of them are powerful techniques of fic-
tional action; they are not necessities ... I do not believe that the novelist
must create characters; he must create a particular and coherent world.”
Man’s Fate certainly does create such a world; is it a liability or not that
Novelists and Novels 345

Kyo, Katov, Gisors and the others fall short as characters, since they do not
stride out of the novel, breaking loose from Malraux, and they all of them
do sound rather alike. I finish rereading Nostromo, and I brood on the flam-
boyant Capataz, or I put down As I Lay Dying, and Darl Bundren’s very
individual voice haunts me. But Kyo and Katov give me nothing to medi-
tate upon, and Gisors and Ferral speak with the same inflection and vocab-
ulary. Fate or contingency resists appropriation by Malraux’s heroes, none
of whom defies, or breaks free of, his creator.
Despite Malraux’s defense, the sameness of his protagonists consti-
tutes a definite aesthetic limitation. It would be one thing to create varied
individuals with unique voices and then to show that they cannot commu-
nicate with one another. It is quite another thing to represent so many
aspects of the author as so many characters, all speaking with his voice, and
then demonstrate the deathliness of their inability to speak truly to anoth-
er. Malraux confused death with contingency, which is a philosopher’s
error, rather than a strong novelist’s.
This may be why the women throughout Malraux’s novels are so dis-
mal a failure in representation. Unamuno ironically jested that “all women
are one woman,” which is just the way things are in Malraux’s fictions. A
novelist so intent upon Man rather than men is unlikely to give us an infi-
nite variety of women.
What redeems Man’s Fate from a reader’s frustration with the same-
ness of its characters is the novel’s indubitable capture of a tragic sense of
life. Tragedy is not individual in Malraux, but societal and cultural, partic-
ularly the latter. Malraux’s Marxism was always superficial, and his aes-
theticism fortunately profound. The tragedy of the heroes in Man’s Fate is
necessarily belated tragedy, which is fitting for idealists whose place in rev-
olutionary history is so late. That is why Gisors is shown teaching his stu-
dents that: “Marxism is not a doctrine, it is a will ... it is the will to know
themselves ... to conquer without betraying yourselves.” Just as the imagi-
nation cannot be distinguished from the will as an artistic tradition grows
older and longer, so ideology blends into the will as revolutionary tradition
enters a very late phase. Tragedy is an affair of the will, and not of doctrine.
Kyo and Katov die in the will, and so achieve tragic dignity. Gisors, the
best mind in the novel, sums up for Malraux, just a few pages from the end:

She was silent for a moment:


“They are dead, now,” she said finally.
“I still think so, May. It’s something else.... Kyo’s death is not
only grief, not only change—it is ... a metamorphosis. I have never
loved the world over-much: it was Kyo who attached me to men,
346 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

it was through him that they existed for me.... I don’t want to go
to Moscow. I would teach wretchedly there. Marxism has ceased
to live in me. In Kyo’s eyes it was a will, wasn’t it? But in mine, it
is a fatality, and I found myself in harmony with it because my fear
of death was in harmony with fatality. There is hardly any fear left
in me, May; since Kyo died, I am indifferent to death. I am freed
(freed! ...) both from death and from life. What would I do over
there?”
“Change anew, perhaps.”
“I have no other son to lose.”

The distinction between a will and a fatality is the difference between


son and father, activist and theoretician, latecomer and forerunner. For
Malraux, it is an aesthetic distinction, rather than a psychological or spiri-
tual difference. As novelist, Malraux takes no side in this dichotomy, an
impartiality at once his narrative strength and his representational weak-
ness. He gives us forces and events, where we hope for more, for access to
consciousnesses other than our own, or even his. As a theorist of art,
Malraux brilliantly grasped contingency, but as a novelist he suffered it. He
saw that the creator had to create his own language out of the language of
precursors, but he could not enact what he saw. Man’s Fate is a memorable
tragedy without memorable persons. Perhaps it survives as a testament of
Malraux’s own tragedy, as a creator.
N O V E L I S T S
John Steinbeck

A N D
(1902–1968)

N O V E L S
IT IS EIGHTEEN YEARS SINCE JOHN STEINBECK DIED, AND WHILE HIS
popularity as a novelist still endures, his critical reputation has suffered a
considerable decline. His honors were many and varied, and included the
Nobel Prize and the United States Medal of Freedom. His best novels
came early in his career: In Dubious Battle (1936); Of Mice and Men (1937);
The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Nothing after that, including East of Eden
(1952), bears rereading. It would be good to record that rereading his three
major novels is a valuable experience, from an aesthetic as well as an his-
torical perspective.
Of Mice and Men, an economical work, really a novella, retains consid-
erable power, marred by an intense sentimentality. But In Dubious Battle is
now quite certainly a period piece, and is of more interest to social histori-
ans than to literary critics. The Grapes of Wrath, still Steinbeck’s most
famous and popular novel, is a very problematical work, and very difficult
to judge. As story, or rather, chronicle, it lacks invention, and its characters
are not persuasive representations of human inwardness. The book’s waver-
ing strength is located elsewhere, in a curious American transformation of
biblical substance and style that worked splendidly in Whitman and
Hemingway, but seems to work only fitfully in Steinbeck.

The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck suffers from too close a comparison with Hemingway, his


authentic precursor though born only three years before his follower. I
think that Steinbeck’s aesthetic problem was Hemingway, whose shadow
always hovered too near. Consider the opening of The Grapes of Wrath:

347
348 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the
last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The
plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lift-
ed the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along
the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red
country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of
May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs
for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on
the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along
the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went
away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew
darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any
more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as
the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red
country and white in the gray country.
In the water-cut gullies the earth dusted down in dry little
streams. Gophers and ant lions started small avalanches. And as
the sharp sun struck day after day, the leaves of the young corn
became less stiff and erect; they bent in a curve at first, and then,
as the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted down-
ward. Then it was June, and the sun shone more fiercely. The
brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the cen-
tral ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots.
The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth
paled.

This is not so much biblical style as mediated by Ernest Hemingway,


as it is Hemingway assimilated to Steinbeck’s sense of biblical style. The
monosyllabic diction is hardly the mode of the King James Version, but
certainly is Hemingway’s. I give, very nearly at random, passages from The
Sun Also Rises:

We passed through a town and stopped in front of the posada, and


the driver took on several packages. Then we started on again, and
outside the town the road commenced to mount. We were going
through farming country with rocky hills that sloped down into
the fields. The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went
higher there was a wind blowing the grain. The road was white
and dusty, and the dust rose under the wheels and hung in the air
behind us. The road climbed up into the hills and left the rich
grain-fields below. Now there were only patches of grain on the
Novelists and Novels 349

bare hillsides and on each side of the water-courses. We turned


sharply out to the side of the road to give room to pass to a long
string of six mules, following one after the other, hauling a high-
hooded wagon loaded with freight. The wagon and the mules
were covered with dust. Close behind was another string of mules
and another wagon. This was loaded with lumber, and the arriero
driving the mules leaned back and put on the thick wooden brakes
as we passed. Up here the country was quite barren and the hills
were rocky and hard-baked clay furrowed by the rain.

The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was barren
and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass beside the
road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below.
Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hill-
sides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were
strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept chang-
ing. As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other
mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the
crest, flattened out, and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork
oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there
were cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest
and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out
ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond
it. These were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had
left behind. These were wooded and there were clouds coming
down from them. The green plain stretched off. It was cut by
fences and the white of the road showed through the trunks of a
double line of trees that crossed the plain toward the north. As we
came to the edge of the rise we saw the red roofs and white hous-
es of Burguete ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the
shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed
roof of the monastery of Roncevalles.

Hemingway’s Basque landscapes are described with an apparent liter-


alness and in what seems at first a curiously dry tone, almost flat in its evi-
dent lack of significant emotion. But a closer reading suggests that the style
here is itself a metaphor for a passion and a nostalgia that is both defensive
and meticulous. The contrast between rich soil and barren ground,
between wooded hills and heat-baked mountains, is a figure for the lost
potency of Jake Barnes, but also for a larger sense of the lost possibilities
of life. Steinbeck, following after Hemingway, cannot learn the lesson. He
350 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

gives us a vision of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, and it is effective enough,


but it is merely a landscape where a process of entropy has been enacted.
It has a social and economic meaning, but as a vision of loss lacks spiritual
and personal intensity. Steinbeck is more overtly biblical than Hemingway,
but too obviously so. We feel that the Bible’s sense of meaning in landscape
has returned from the dead in Hemingway’s own colors, but hardly in
Steinbeck’s.
If Steinbeck is not an original or even an adequate stylist, if he lacks
skill in plot, and power in the mimesis of character, what then remains in
his work, except its fairly constant popularity with an immense number of
liberal middlebrows, both in his own country and abroad? Certainly, he
aspired beyond his aesthetic means. If the literary Sublime, or contest for
the highest place, involves persuading the reader to yield up easier pleas-
ures for more difficult pleasures, and it does, then Steinbeck modestly
should have avoided Emerson’s American Sublime, but he did not.
Desiring it both ways, he fell into bathos in everything he wrote, even in
Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.
Yet Steinbeck had many of the legitimate impulses of the Sublime
writer, and of his precursors Whitman and Hemingway in particular. Like
them, he studied the nostalgias, the aboriginal sources that were never
available for Americans, and like them he retained a profound hope for the
American as natural man and natural woman. Unlike Whitman and
Hemingway and the origin of this American tradition, Emerson, Steinbeck
had no capacity for the nuances of literary irony. He had read Emerson’s
essay “The Over-Soul” as his precursors had, but Steinbeck literalized it.
Emerson, canniest where he is most the Idealist, barbs his doctrine of “that
Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is con-
tained and made one with all other.” In Emerson, that does not involve the
sacrifice of particular being, and is hardly a program for social action:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime


within man is the soul of the whole....
The soul knows only the soul; all else is idle weeds for her wear-
ing.

There always have been Emersonians of the Left, like Whitman and
Steinbeck, and Emersonians of the Right, like Henry James and Wallace
Stevens. Emerson himself, rather gingerly planted on the moderate Left,
evaded all positions. Social action is also an affair of succession, division,
parts, particles; if “the soul knows only the soul,” then the soul cannot
know doctrines, or even human suffering. Steinbeck, socially generous, a
Novelists and Novels 351

writer on the left, structured the doctrine of The Grapes of Wrath on Jim
Casy’s literalization of Emerson’s vision: “Maybe all men got one big soul
and everybody’s a part of it.” Casy, invested by Steinbeck with a rough elo-
quence that would have moved Emerson, speaks his orator’s epitaph just
before he is martyred: “They figger I’m a leader ‘cause I talk so much.” He
is a leader, an Okie Moses, and he dies a fitting death for the visionary of
an Exodus.
I remain uneasy about my own experience of rereading The Grapes of
Wrath. Steinbeck is not one of the inescapable American novelists of our
century; he cannot be judged in close relation to Cather, Dreiser, and
Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Ralph Ellison, and
Thomas Pynchon. Yet there are no canonical standards worthy of human
respect that could exclude The Grapes of Wrath from a serious reader’s
esteem. Compassionate narrative that addresses itself so directly to the
great social questions of its era is simply too substantial a human achieve-
ment to be dismissed. Whether a human strength, however generously
worked through, is also an aesthetic value, in a literary narrative, is one of
those larger issues that literary criticism scarcely knows how to decide.
One might desire The Grapes of Wrath to be composed differently, whether
as plot or as characterization, but wisdom compels one to he grateful for
the novel’s continued existence.

Of Mice and Men

The late Anthony Burgess, in a touching salute from one professional


writer to another, commended Of Mice and Men as “a fine novella (or play
with extended stage directions) which succeeds because it dares sentimen-
tality.” Rereading Of Mice and Men, I remain impressed by its economical
intensity, which has authentic literary power, though the sentimentality
sometimes seems to me excessive. The book has been called Darwinian
and naturalistic; it does share in the kind of dramatic pathos featured also
in the plays of Eugene O’Neill and the novels of Theodore Dreiser. Reality
is harsh and ultimately scarcely to be borne; dreams and delusions alone
allow men to keep going. George and Lennie share the hopeless dream of
a little ranch of their own, where George could keep the well-meaning but
disaster-prone Lennie out of trouble and sorrow. As several critics have
noted, this is one of Steinbeck’s recurrent dreams of a lost Eden, sadly illu-
sory yet forever beckoning.
As in the works of O’Neill and of Dreiser, the anxiety that afflicts all
of Steinbeck’s male protagonists is a desperate solitude. Despite his fre-
quent use of Biblical style, more marked in The Grapes of Wrath than in Of
352 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Mice and Men, Steinbeck was anything but a religious writer, by tempera-
ment and by belief. His heavy naturalism is very close to fatalism: Lennie
is doomed by his nature, which craves affection, softness, the childlike, yet
which is overwhelmingly violent and pragmatically brutal because of child-
ish bafflement and defensiveness. What could anyone have done to save
Lennie? Since George is truly responsible and caring and still fails to keep
Lennie safe, it seems clear that even institutionalization could not have
saved Steinbeck’s most pathetic version of natural man. That returns the
burden of Steinbeck’s sad fable to Steinbeck himself: What has the author
done for himself as a novelist by telling us this overdetermined story, and
what do we gain as readers by attending to it? Though there are dramatic
values in Of Mice and Men, they are inadequate compared to O’Neill at his
best. There is an authentic dignity in the brotherhood of George and
Lennie, but it too seems stunted compared to the massive humanity of the
major figures in Dreiser’s strongest narratives, Sister Carrie and An
American Tragedy. Clearly there is something that endures in Of Mice and
Men as in The Grapes of Wrath, though the novella lacks the social force of
Steinbeck’s major novel. Is it the stoic minimalism of George and Lennie
and their fellow wandering ranch hands that somehow achieves a memo-
rable image of human value?
Steinbeck resented Hemingway because he owed Hemingway too
much, both in style and in the perception of the aesthetic dignity of natu-
ral men, at once unable to bear either society or solitude. The counterin-
fluence in Of Mice and Men seems to be the Faulkner of The Sound and the
Fury, particularly in the representation of poor Lennie, who may have in
him a trace of the benign idiot, Benjy. Any comparison of Faulkner and
Steinbeck will tend to lessen Steinbeck, who is overmatched by Faulkner’s
mythic inventiveness and consistent strength of characterization. Yet there
is a mythic quality to Of Mice and Men, a clear sense that Lennie and
George ultimately represent something larger than either their selves or
their relationship. They touch a permanence because their mutual care
enhances both of them. That care cannot save Lennie, and it forces
George to execute his friend to save him from the hideous violence of a
mob. But the care survives Lennie’s death; Slim’s recognition of the digni-
ty and the value of the care is the novel’s final gesture, and is richly shared
by the reader.
N O V E L I S T S
Nathanael West

A N D
(1903–1940)

N O V E L S
Miss Lonelyhearts

NATHANAEL WEST, WHO DIED IN AN AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT IN 1940 AT


the age of thirty-seven, wrote one remorseless masterpiece, Miss
Lonelyhearts (1933). Despite some astonishing sequences, The Day of the
Locust (1939) is an overpraised work, a waste of West’s genius. Of the two
lesser fictions, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) is squalid and dreadful,
with occasional passages of a rancid power, while A Cool Million (1934),
though an outrageous parody of American picaresque, is a permanent work
of American satire and seems to me underpraised. To call West uneven is
therefore a litotes; he is a wild medley of magnificent writing and inade-
quate writing, except in Miss Lonelyhearts which excels The Sun Also Rises,
The Great Gatsby, and even Sanctuary as the perfected instance of a negative
vision in modern American fiction. The greatest Faulkner, of The Sound and
the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, is the only
American writer of prose fiction in this century who can be said to have
surpassed Miss Lonelyhearts. West’s spirit lives again in The Crying of Lot 49
and some sequences in Gravity’s Rainbow, but the negative sublimity of Miss
Lonelyhearts proves to be beyond Pynchon’s reach, or perhaps his ambition.
West, born Nathan Weinstein, is a significant episode in the long and
tormented history of Jewish Gnosticism. The late Gershom Scholem’s
superb essay, “Redemption Through Sin,” in his The Messianic Idea in
Judaism, is the best commentary I know upon Miss Lonelyhearts. I once
attempted to convey this to Scholem, who shrugged West off, quite prop-
erly from Scholem’s viewpoint, when I remarked to him that West was
manifestly a Jewish anti-Semite, and admitted that there were no allusions
to Jewish esotericism or Kabbalah in his works. Nevertheless, for the stance

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of literary criticism, Jewish Gnosticism, as defined by Scholem, is the most


illuminating context in which to study West’s novels. It is a melancholy
paradox that West, who did not wish to be Jewish in any way at all, remains
the most indisputably Jewish writer yet to appear in America, a judgment
at once aesthetic and moral. Nothing by Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth,
Mailer, or Ozick can compare to Miss Lonelyhearts as an achievement.
West’s Jewish heir, if he has one, may be Harold Brodkey, whose recent
Women and Angels, excerpted from his immense novel-in-progress, can be
regarded as another powerful instance of Jewish Gnosis, free of West’s
hatred of his own Jewishness.
Stanley Edgar Hyman, in his pamphlet on West (1962), concluded that,
“His strength lay in his vulgarity and bad taste, his pessimism, his nastiness.”
Hyman remains West’s most useful critic, but I would amend this by observ-
ing that these qualities in West’s writing emanate from a negative theology,
spiritually authentic, and given aesthetic dignity by the force of West’s elo-
quent negations. West, like his grandest creation, Shrike, is a rhetorician of
the abyss, in the tradition of Sabbatian nihilism that Scholem has expound-
ed so masterfully. One thinks of ideas such as “the violation of the Torah has
become its fulfillment, just as a grain of wheat must rot in the earth” or such
as Jacob Frank’s: “We are all now under the obligation to enter the abyss.”
The messianic intensity of the Sabbatians and Frankists results in a desper-
ately hysterical and savage tonality which prophesies West’s authentically
religious book, Miss Lonelyhearts, a work profoundly Jewish but only in its
negations, particularly the negation of the normative Judaic assumption of
total sense in everything, life and text alike. Miss Lonelyhearts takes place in
the world of Freud, where the fundamental assumption is that everything
already has happened, and that nothing can be made new because total sense
has been achieved, but then repressed or negated. Negatively Jewish, the
book is also negatively American. Miss Lonelyhearts is a failed Walt
Whitman (hence the naming of the cripple as Peter Doyle, Whitman’s
pathetic friend) and a fallen American Adam to Shrike’s very American
Satan. Despite the opinions of later critics, I continue to find Hyman’s argu-
ment persuasive, and agree with him that the book’s psychosexuality is
marked by a repressed homosexual relation between Shrike and Miss
Lonelyhearts. Hyman’s Freudian observation that all the suffering in the
book is essentially female seems valid, reminding us that Freud’s “feminine
masochism” is mostly encountered among men, according to Freud himself.
Shrike, the butcherbird impaling his victim, Miss Lonelyhearts, upon the
thorns of Christ, is himself as much an instance of “feminine masochism” as
his victim. If Miss Lonelyhearts is close to pathological frenzy, Shrike is also
consumed by religious hysteria, by a terrible nostalgia for God.
Novelists and Novels 355

The book’s bitter stylistic negation results in a spectacular verbal


economy, in which literally every sentence is made to count, in more than
one sense of “count.” Freud’s “negation” involves a cognitive return of the
repressed, here through West’s self-projection as Shrike, spit out but not
disavowed. The same Freudian process depends upon an affective contin-
uance of repression, here by West’s self-introjection as Miss Lonelyhearts,
at once West’s inability to believe and his disavowed failure to love. Poor
Miss Lonelyhearts, who receives no other name throughout the book, has
been destroyed by Shrike’s power of Satanic rhetoric before the book even
opens. But then Shrike has destroyed himself first, for no one could with-
stand the sustained horror of Shrike’s impaling rhetoric, which truly can be
called West’s horror:

“I am a great saint,” Shrike cried, “I can walk on my own water.


Haven’t you ever heard of Shrike’s Passion in the Luncheonette,
or the Agony in the Soda Fountain? Then I compared the wounds
in Christ’s body to the mouths of a miraculous purse in which we
deposit the small change of our sins. It is indeed an excellent con-
ceit. But now let us consider the holes in our own bodies and into
what these congenital wounds open. Under the skin of man is a
wondrous jungle where veins like lush tropical growths hang
along overripe organs and weed-like entrails writhe in squirming
tangles of red and yellow. In this jungle, flitting from rock-gray
lungs to golden intestines, from liver to lights and back to liver
again, lives a bird called the soul. The Catholic hunts this bird
with bread and wine, the Hebrew with a golden ruler, the
Protestant on leaden feet with leaden words, the Buddhist with
gestures, the Negro with blood. I spit on them all. Phooh! And I
call upon you to spit. Phooh! Do you stuff birds? No, my dears,
taxidermy is not religion. No! A thousand times no. Better, I say
unto you, better a live bird in the jungle of the body than two
stuffed birds on the library table.”

I have always associated this great passage with what is central to West:
the messianic longing for redemption, through sin if necessary. West’s
humor is almost always apocalyptic, in a mode quite original with him,
though so influential since his death that we have difficulty seeing how
strong the originality was. Originality, even in comic writing, becomes a dif-
ficulty. How are we to read the most outrageous of the letters sent to Miss
Lonelyhearts, the one written by the sixteen-year-old girl without a nose?
356 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle
of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not
wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when
she looks at me.
What did I do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do
some bad things I didnt do any before I was a year old and I was born
this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesnt know, but that maybe I did
something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being
punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man.
Ought I commit suicide?
Sincerely yours,
Desperate

Defensive laughter is a complex reaction to grotesque suffering. In his


1928 essay on humor, Freud concluded that the above-the-I, the superego,
speaks kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego, and this speaking is
humor, which Freud calls “the triumph of narcissism, the ego’s victorious
assertion of its own invulnerability.” Clearly, Freud’s “humor” does not
include the Westian mode. Reading Desperate’s “What did I do to deserve
such a terrible bad fate?,” our ego knows that it is defeated all the time, or
at least is vulnerable to undeserved horror. West’s humor has no liberating
element whatsoever, but is the humor of a vertigo ill-balanced on the edge
of what ancient Gnosticism called the kenoma, the cosmological emptiness.

II

Shrike, West’s superb Satanic tempter, achieves his apotheosis at the


novel’s midpoint, the eighth of its fifteen tableaux, accurately titled “Miss
Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp.” As Miss Lonelyhearts, sick with
despair, lies in bed, the drunken Shrike bursts in, shouting his greatest
rhetorical set piece, certainly the finest tirade in modern American fiction.
Cataloging the methods that Miss Lonelyhearts might employ to escape
out of the Dismal Swamp, Shrike begins with a grand parody of the later
D.H. Lawrence, in which the vitalism of The Plumed Serpent and The Man
Who Died is carried into a gorgeous absurdity, a heavy sexuality that masks
Shrike’s Satanic fears of impotence:

“You are fed up with the city and its teeming millions. The ways
and means of men, as getting and lending and spending, you lay
waste your inner world, are too much with you. The bus takes too
long, while the subway is always crowded. So what do you do? So
Novelists and Novels 357

you buy a farm and walk behind your horse’s moist behind, no col-
lar or tie, plowing your broad swift acres. As you turn up the rich
black soil, the wind carries the smell of pine and dung across the
fields and the rhythm of an old, old work enters your soul. To this
rhythm, you sow and weep and chivy your kine, not kin or kind,
between the pregnant rows of corn and taters. Your step becomes
the heavy sexual step of a dance-drunk Indian and you tread the
seed down into the female earth. You plant, not dragon’s teeth, but
beans and greens.”

Confronting only silence, Shrike proceeds to parody the Melville of


Typee and Omoo, and also Somerset Maugham’s version of Gauguin in The
Moon and Sixpence:

“You live in a thatch but with the daughter of a king, a slim young
maiden in whose eyes is an ancient wisdom. Her breasts are gold-
en speckled pears, her belly a melon, and her odor is like nothing
so much as a jungle fern. In the evening, on the blue lagoon, under
the silvery moon, to your love you croon in the soft sylabelew and
vocabelew of her langorour tongorour. Your body is golden brown
like hers, and tourists have need of the indignant finger of the mis-
sionary to point you out. They envy you your breech clout and
carefree laugh and little brown bride and fingers instead of forks.
But you don’t return their envy, and when a beautiful society girl
comes to your but in the night, seeking to learn the secret of your
happiness, you send her back to her yacht that hangs on the hori-
zon like a nervous racehorse. And so you dream away the days,
fishing, hunting, dancing, kissing, and picking flowers to twine in
your hair.”

As Shrike says, this is a played-out mode, but his savage gusto in ren-
dering it betrays his hatred of the religion of art, of the vision that sought
a salvation in imaginative literature. What Shrike goes on to chant is an
even more effective parody of the literary stances West rejected. Though
Shrike calls it “Hedonism,” the curious amalgam here of Hemingway and
Ronald Firbank, with touches of Fitzgerald and the earlier Aldous Huxley,
might better be named an aesthetic stoicism:

“You dedicate your life to the pursuit of pleasure. No overindul-


gence, mind you, but knowing that your body is a pleasure
machine, you treat it carefully in order to get the most out of it.
358 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Golf as well as booze, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien and his chest-


weights as well as Spanish dancers. Nor do you neglect the
pleasures of the mind. You fornicate under pictures by Matisse
and Picasso, you drink from Renaissance glassware, and often
you spend an evening beside the fireplace with Proust and au
apple. Alas, after much good fun, the day comes when you real-
ize that soon you must die. You keep a stiff upper lip and decide
to give a last party. You invite all your old mistresses, trainers,
artists and boon companions. The guests are dressed in black,
the waiters are coons, the table is a coffin carved for you by Eric
Gill. You serve caviar and blackberries and licorice candy and
coffee without cream. After the dancing girls have finished, you
get to your feet and call for silence in order to explain your phi-
losophy of life. ‘Life,’ you say, ‘is a club where they won’t stand
for squawks, where they deal you only one hand and you must sit
in. So even if the cards are cold and marked by the hand of fate,
play up, play up like a gentleman and a sport. Get tanked, grab
what’s on the buffet, use the girls upstairs, but remember, when
you throw box cars, take the curtain like a dead game sport, don’t
squawk.’ ”

Even this is only preparatory to Shrike’s bitterest phase in his tirade,


an extraordinary send-up of High Aestheticism proper, of Pater, George
Moore, Wilde and the earlier W.B. Yeats:

“Art! Be an artist or a writer. When you are cold, warm yourself


before the flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry, nourish
yourself with great spiritual foods by listening to the noble peri-
ods of Bach, the harmonies of Brahms and the thunder of
Beethoven. Do you think there is anything in the fact that their
names all begin with a B? But don’t take a chance, smoke a 3 B
pipe, and remember these immortal lines: When to the suddenness of
melody the echo parting falls the failing day. What a rhythm! Tell
them to keep their society whores and pressed duck with oranges.
For you l’art vivant, the living art, as you call it. Tell them that you
know that your shoes are broken and that there are pimples on
your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but
that you don’t care, for to-morrow they are playing Beethoven’s
last quartets in Carnegie Hall and at home you have Shakespeare’s
plays in one volume.”
Novelists and Novels 359

That last sentence, truly and deliciously Satanic, is one of West’s great-
est triumphs, but he surpasses it in the ultimate Shrikean rhapsody, after
Shrike’s candid avowal: “God alone is our escape.” With marvelous appro-
priateness, West makes this at once the ultimate Miss Lonelyhearts letter,
and also Shrike’s most Satanic self-identification, in the form of a letter to
Christ dictated for Miss Lonelyhearts by Shrike, who speaks absolutely for
both of them:

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts—


I am twenty-six years old and in the newspaper game. Life for me is
a desert empty of comfort. I cannot find pleasure in food, drink, or
women—nor do the arts give me joy any longer. The Leopard of
Discontent walks the streets of my city; the Lion of Discouragement
crouches outside the walls of my citadel. All is desolation and a vexation
of spirit. I feel like hell. How can I believe, how can I have faith in this
day and age? Is it true that the greatest scientists believe again in you?
I read your column and like it very much. There you once wrote:
‘When the salt has lost its savour, who shall savour it again?’ Is the
answer: ‘None but the Saviour?’
Thanking you very much for a quick reply, I remain yours truly,
A Regular Subscriber

“I feel like hell,” the Miltonic “Myself am Hell,” is Shrike’s credo, and
West’s.

III

What is the relation of Shrike to West’s rejected Jewishness? The


question may seem illegitimate to many admirers of West, but it acquires
considerable force in the context of the novel’s sophisticated yet unhistor-
ical Gnosticism. The way of nihilism means, according to Scholem, “to
free oneself of all laws, conventions, and religions, to adopt every conceiv-
able attitude and to reject it, and to follow one’s leader step for step into
the abyss.” Scholem is paraphrasing the demonic Jacob Frank, an eigh-
teenth-century Jewish Shrike who brought the Sabbatian messianic move-
ment to its final degradation. Frank would have recognized something of
his own negations and nihilistic fervor in the closing passages that form a
pattern in West’s four novels:

His body screamed and shouted as it marched and uncoiled; then,


with one heaving shout of triumph, it fell back quiet.
360 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The army that a moment before had been thundering in his


body retreated slowly—victorious, relieved.
(The Dream Life of Balso Snell)

While they were struggling, Betty came in through the street


door. She called to them to stop and started up the stairs. The
cripple saw her cutting off his escape and tried to get rid of the
package. He pulled his hand out. The gun inside the package
exploded and Miss Lonelyhearts fell, dragging the cripple with
him. They both rolled part of the way down the stairs.
(Miss Lonelyhearts)

“Alas, Lemuel Pitkin himself did not have this chance, but instead
was dismantled by the enemy. His teeth were pulled out. His eye
was gouged from his head. His thumb was removed. His scalp was
torn away. His leg was cut off. And, finally, he was shot through
the heart.
“But he did not live or die in vain. Through his martyrdom the
National Revolutionary Party triumphed, and by that triumph
this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism and
International Capitalism. Through the National Revolution its
people were purged of alien diseases and America became again
American.”
“Hail the martyrdom in the Bijou Theater!” roar Shagpoke’s
youthful hearers when he is finished.
“Hail, Lemuel Pitkin!”
“All hail, the American Boy!”
(A Cool Million)

He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into
a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he
was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They
were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some rea-
son this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud
as he could.
(The Day of the Locust)

All four passages mutilate the human image, the image of God that
normative Jewish tradition associates with our origins. “Our forefathers
were always talking, only what good did it do them and what did they
accomplish? But we are under the burden of silence,” Jacob Frank said.
Novelists and Novels 361

What Frank’s and West’s forefathers always talked about was the ultimate
forefather, Adam, who would have enjoyed the era of the Messiah, had he
not sinned. West retains of tradition only the emptiness of the fallen
image, the scattered spark of creation. The screaming and falling body,
torn apart and maddened into a siren-like laughter, belongs at once to the
American Surrealist poet, Balso Snell; the American Horst Wessel, poor
Lemuel Pitkin; to Miss Lonelyhearts, the Whitmanian American Christ;
and to Tod Hackett, painter of the American apocalypse. All are nihilistic
versions of the mutilated image of God, or of what the Jewish Gnostic
visionary, Nathan of Gaza, called the “thought-less” or nihilizing light.

IV

West was a prophet of American violence, which he saw as augment-


ing progressively throughout our history. His satirical genius, for all its
authentic and desperate range, has been defeated by American reality.
Shagpoke Whipple, the Calvin Coolidge-like ex-President who becomes
the American Hitler in A Cool Million, talks in terms that West intended as
extravagant, but that now can be read all but daily in our newspapers. Here
is Shagpoke at his best, urging us to hear what the dead Lemuel Pitkin has
to tell us:

“Of what is it that he speaks? Of the right of every American


boy to go into the world and there receive fair play and a chance
to make his fortune by industry and probity without being
laughed at or conspired against by sophisticated aliens.”

I turn to today’s New York Times (March 29, 1985) and find there the
text of a speech given by our President:

But may I just pause here for a second and tell you about a couple
of fellows who came to see me the other day, young men. In 1981,
just four years ago, they started a business with only a thousand
dollars between them and everyone told them they were crazy.
Last year their business did a million and a half dollars and they
expect to do two and a half million this year. And part of it was
because they had the wit to use their names productively. Their
business is using their names, the Cain and Abell electric business.

Reality may have triumphed over poor West, but only because he,
doubtless as a ghost, inspired or wrote these Presidential remarks. The
362 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Times reports, sounding as deadpan as Shrike, on the same page (B4), that
the young entrepreneurs brought a present to Mr. Reagan. “ ‘ We gave him
a company jacket with Cain and Abell, Inc. on it,’ Mr. Cain said.” Perhaps
West’s ghost now writes not only Shagpokian speeches, but the very text of
reality in our America.
N O V E L I S T S
George Orwell

A N D
(1903–1950)

N O V E L S
1984

THERE IS AN EQUIVOCAL IRONY TO READING, AND WRITING, ABOUT


George Orwell in 1986. I have just reread 1984, Animal Farm, and many of
the essays for the first time in some years, and I find myself lost in an inter-
play of many contending reactions, moral and aesthetic. Orwell, aestheti-
cally considered, is a far better essayist than a novelist. Lionel Trilling,
reviewing 1984, in 1949, praised the book, with a singular moral authority:

The whole effort of the culture of the last hundred years has been
directed toward teaching us to understand the economic motive as
the irrational road to death, and to seek salvation in the rational
and the planned. Orwell marks a turn in thought; he asks us to
consider whether the triumph of certain forces of the mind, in
their naked pride and excess, may not produce a state of things far
worse than any we have ever known. He is not the first to raise the
question, but he is the first to raise it on truly liberal or radical
grounds, with no intention of abating the demand for a just socie-
ty, and with an overwhelming intensity and passion. This priority
makes his book a momentous one.

The book remains momentous; perhaps it always will be so. But there
is nothing intrinsic to the book that will determine its future importance.
Its very genre will be established by political, social, economic events. Is it
satire or science fiction or dystopia or countermanifesto? Last week I read
newspaper accounts of two recent speeches, perorations delivered by
President Reagan and by Norman Podhoretz, each favorably citing Orwell.

363
364 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The President, awarding medals to Senator Barry Goldwater and Helen


Hayes, among others, saw them as exemplars of Orwell’s belief in freedom
and individual dignity, while the sage Podhoretz allowed himself to
observe that Orwell would have become a neoconservative had he but sur-
vived until this moment. Perhaps irony, however equivocal, is inadequate
to represent so curious a posthumous fate as has come to the author of
Homage to Catalonia, a man who went to Barcelona to fight for the Party of
Marxist Unity and the Anarcho-Syndicalists.
V.S. Pritchett and others were correct in describing Orwell as the best
of modern pamphleteers. A pamphlet certainly can achieve aesthetic emi-
nence; “tracts and pamphlets” is a major genre, particularly in Great
Britain, where its masters include Milton, Defoe, Swift, Dr. Johnson,
Burke, Blake, Shelley, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman. Despite his celebrat-
ed mastery of the plain style, it is rather uncertain that Orwell has joined
himself to that company. I suspect that he is closer to the category that he
once described as “good bad books,” giving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin as a supreme instance. Aesthetically considered, 1984 is very
much the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our time, with poor Winston Smith as
Uncle Tom, the unhappy Julia as little Eva, and the more-than-sadistic
O’Brien as Simon Legree. I do not find O’Brien to be as memorable as
Simon Legree, but then that is part of Orwell’s point. We have moved into
a world in which our torturers also have suffered a significant loss of per-
sonality.

II

Orwell’s success as a prophet is necessarily a mixed one, since his rel-


ative crudity as a creator of character obliges us to read 1984 rather liter-
ally. What works best in the novel is its contextualization of all the phras-
es it has bequeathed to our contemporary language, though whether to the
language is not yet certain. Newspeak and doublethink, “War Is Peace,”
“Freedom Is Slavery,” “Ignorance Is Strength,” “Big Brother Is Watching
You,” the Thought Police, the Two Minutes Hate, the Ministry of Truth,
and all the other Orwellian inventions that are now wearisome clichés, are
restored to some force, though little freshness, when we encounter them
where they first arose.
Unfortunately, in itself that does not suffice. Even a prophetic pam-
phlet requires eloquence if we are to return to it and find ourselves affect-
ed at least as much as we were before. 1984 can hurt you a single time, and
most likely when you are young. After that, defensive laughter becomes the
aesthetic problem. Rereading 1984 can be too much like watching a really
Novelists and Novels 365

persuasive horror movie; humor acquires the validity of health.


Contemporary reviewers, even Trilling, were too overwhelmed by the
book’s relevance to apprehend its plain badness as narrative or Orwell’s
total inability to represent even a curtailed human personality or moral
character. Mark Schorer’s response in the New York Times Book Review may
have seemed appropriate on June 12, 1949, but its hyperboles now provoke
polite puzzlement:

No real reader can neglect this experience with impunity. He will


be moved by Smith’s wistful attempts to remember a different
kind of life from his. He will make a whole new discovery of the
beauty of love between man and woman, and of the strange beau-
ty of landscape in a totally mechanized world. He will be asked to
read through pages of sustained physical and psychological pain
that have seldom been equaled and never in such quiet, sober
prose. And he will return to his own life from Smith’s escape into
living death with a resolution to resist power wherever it means to
deny him his individuality, and to resist for himself the poisonous
lures of power.

Would it make a difference now if Orwell had given his book the title
“1994”? Our edge of foreboding has vanished when we contemplate the
book, if indeed we ought to regard it as a failed apocalypse. Yet all apoca-
lypses, in the literary sense, are failed apocalypses, so that if they fade, the
phenomenon of literary survival or demise clearly takes precedence over
whatever status social prophecy affords. The limits of Orwell’s achieve-
ment are clarified if we juxtapose it directly to the authentic American
apocalypses of our time: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Nathanael West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Why do they go on
wounding us, reading after reading, while 1984 threatens to become a peri-
od piece, however nightmarish? It would be absurdly unfair to look at 1984
side by side with Kafka and Beckett; Orwell was in no way an aspirant after
the sublime, however demonic or diminished. But he was a satirist, and in
1984 a kind of phantasmagoric realist. If his O’Brien is not of the stature
of the unamiable Simon Legree, he is altogether nonexistent as a Satanic
rhetorician if we attempt to bring him into the company of West’s Shrike.
Can a novel survive praise that endlessly centers upon its author’s
humane disposition, his indubitable idealism, his personal honesty, his
political courage, his moral nature? Orwell may well have been the exem-
plary and representative Socialist intellectual of our time (though
Raymond Williams, the crucial Marxist literary critic in Great Britain,
366 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

definitely does not think so). But very bad men and women have written
superb novels, and great moralists have written unreadable ones. 1984 is
neither superb nor unreadable. If it resembles the work of a precursor fig-
ure, that figure is surely H.G. Wells, as Wyndham Lewis shrewdly real-
ized. Wells surpasses Orwell in storytelling vigor, in pungency of charac-
terization, and in imaginative invention, yet Wells now seems remote and
Orwell remains very close. We are driven back to what makes 1984 a good
bad book: relevance. The book substitutes for a real and universal fear: that
in the political and economic area, the dreadful is still about to happen. Yet
the book again lacks a defense against its own blunderings into the ridicu-
lous. As social prophecy, it is closer to Sinclair Lewis’s now forgotten It
Can’t Happen Here than to Nathanael West’s still hilarious A Cool Million,
where Big Brother, under the name of Shagpoke Whipple, speaks uncan-
nily in the accents shared by Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. Why
could not Orwell have rescued his book by some last touch of irony or by
a valid invocation of the satiric Muse?

III

What Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno grimly called the Culture
Industry has absorbed Orwell, and his 1984 in particular. Is this because
Orwell retains such sentimentalities or soft idealisms as the poignance of
true love? After all, Winston and Julia are terrorized out of love by brute
pain and unendurable fear; no one could regard them as having been cul-
pable in their forced abandonment of one another. This is akin to Orwell’s
fantastic and wholly unconvincing hope that the proles might yet offer sal-
vation, a hope presumably founded upon the odd notion that Oceania lets
eighty-five percent of its population go back to nature in the slums of
London and other cities. Love and the working class are therefore pretty
much undamaged in Orwell’s vision. Contrast Pynchon’s imaginative
“paranoia” in Gravity’s Rainbow, where all of us, of whatever social class,
live in the Zone which is dominated by the truly paranoid System, and
where authentic love can be represented only as sado-masochism. There is
a Counterforce in Gravity’s Rainbow that fights the System, but it is inef-
fectual, farcical, and can be animated only by the peculiar ideology that
Pynchon calls sado-anarchism, an ideology that the Culture Industry can-
not absorb, and that I suspect Adorno gladly would have embraced.
I don’t intend this introduction as a drubbing or trashing of Orwell
and 1984, and Gravity’s Rainbow, being an encyclopedic prose epic, is hard-
ly a fair agonist against which 1984 should be matched. But the aesthetic
badness of 1984 is palpable enough, and I am a good enough disciple of the
Novelists and Novels 367

divine Oscar Wilde to wonder if an aesthetic inadequacy really can be a


moral splendor? Simon Legree beats poor old Uncle Tom to death, and
O’Brien pretty well wrecks Winston Smith’s body and then reduces him to
supposed ruin by threatening him with some particularly nasty and hungry
rats. Is Uncle Tom’s Cabin actually a moral achievement, even if Harriet
Beecher Stowe hastened both the Civil War and the Emancipation
Proclamation? Is 1984 a moral triumph, even if it hastens a multiplication
of neoconservatives?
The defense of a literary period piece cannot differ much from a
defense of period pieces in clothes, household objects, popular music,
movies, and the lower reaches of the visual arts. A period piece that is a
political and social polemic, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 1984, acquires a
curious charm of its own. What partly saves 1984 from Orwell’s overliter-
alness and failures in irony is the strange archaism of its psychology and
rhetoric:

He paused for a few moments, as though to allow what he had


been saying to sink in.
“Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary,
‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”
“Yes,” said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with
the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the Party says that it is not four but five—then how
many?”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had
shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s
body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans
which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien
watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the
lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
The needle went up to sixty.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The
heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers
368 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seem-
ing to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Five! Five! Five!”
“No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there
are four. How many fingers, please?”
“Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the
pain!”
Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoul-
ders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The
bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very
cold, he was shaking uncontrollably. His teeth were chattering,
the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to
O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round
his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector,
that the pain was something that came from outside, from some
other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing
what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes. Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes
they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must
try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip on his limbs tight-
ened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had
stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O’Brien motioned
with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immo-
bile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent
down and looked closely into Winston’s eyes, felt his pulse, laid an
ear against his chest, tapped here and there; then he nodded to
O’Brien.
“Again,” said O’Brien.
The pain flowed into Winston’s body. The needle must be at
seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that
the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was
somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to
notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again.
He opened his eyes. O’Brien had drawn back the lever.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
Novelists and Novels 369

“Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am


trying to see five.”
“Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or real-
ly to see them?”
“Really to see them.”
“Again,” said O’Brien.
If we took this with high seriousness, then its offense against any per-
suasive mode of representation would make us uneasy. But it is a grand
period piece, parodying not only Stalin’s famous trials, but many theolog-
ically inspired ordeals before the advent of the belated Christian heresy
that Russian Marxism actually constitutes. Orwell was a passionate moral-
ist, and an accomplished essayist. The age drove him to the composition of
political romance, though he lacked nearly all of the gifts necessary for the
writer of narrative fiction. 1984 is an honorable aesthetic failure, and per-
haps time will render its crudities into so many odd period graces, rem-
nants of a vanished era. Yet the imagination, as Wallace Stevens once
wrote, is always at the end of an era. Lionel Trilling thought that O’Brien’s
torture of Winston Smith was “a hideous parody on psychotherapy and the
Platonic dialogues.” Thirty-seven years after Trilling’s review, the scene I
have quoted above seems more like self-parody, as though Orwell’s narra-
tive desperately sought its own reduction, its own outrageous descent into
the fallacy of believing that only the worst truth about us can be the truth.
Orwell was a dying man as he wrote the book, suffering the wasting
away of his body in consumption. D.H. Lawrence, dying the same way,
remained a heroic vitalist, as his last poems and stories demonstrate. But
Lawrence belonged to literary culture, to the old, high line of transcen-
dental seers. What wanes and dies in 1984 is not the best of George
Orwell, not the pamphleteer of The Lion and the Unicorn nor the autobiog-
rapher of Homage to Catalonia nor the essayist of Shooting an Elephant. That
Orwell lived and died an independent Socialist, hardly Marxist but really a
Spanish Anarchist, or an English dissenter and rebel of the line of
Cromwell and of Cromwell’s celebrators, Milton and Carlyle. 1984 has the
singular power, not aesthetic but social, of being the product of an age, and
not just of the man who set it down.

Animal Farm

Animal Farm is a beast fable, more in the mode of Jonathan Swift’s savage
indignation than in Chaucer’s gentler irony. George Orwell was startled
when the book became children’s literature, rather like Gulliver’s Travels
before it. And yet that is what saves the book aesthetically; Nineteen
370 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Eighty-Four is very thin when compared to Animal Farm. Boxer the cart-
horse, Clover the mare, and Benjamin the donkey all have considerably
more personality than does Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Fable necessarily suited Orwell better than the novel, because
he was essentially an essayist and a satirist, and not a storyteller. Animal
Farm is best regarded as a fusion of satirical political pamphlet and beast
fable, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the historical aspect of the
book necessarily has faded. The end of Stalinism removed the immediacy
of Animal Farm, which now survives only by its pathos. Children are the
book’s best audience because of its simplicity and directness. Something in
Orwell entertained a great nostalgia for an older, rural England, one that
preceded industrial blight. The vision of Old Major, the boar who proph-
esies the transformation of Manor Farm into Animal Farm, is essentially
Orwell’s own ideal, and has a childlike quality that is very poignant.
It is very difficult to understand the psychology of any of the animals
in Orwell’s fantasy. How does Snowball (Trotsky) differ from Napoleon
(Stalin) in his motivations? We cannot say; either Orwell does not know or
he does not care. We are moved by poor Boxer, who works himself to
death for the supposed common good, but we could not describe Boxer’s
personality. Even as a fabulist, Orwell has acute limitations; he could not
create distincts. He was a considerable moralist, who passionately champi-
oned individuality, but he had no ability to translate that passion into imag-
ining separate individuals. The creatures of Animal Farm compare poorly
to those of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Toad of Toad Hall
and Badger are sustained literary characters; Boxer and Benjamin are not.
Whether Animal Farm truly can survive as children’s literature seems to
me rather doubtful, in the longest perspective.
Still, the narrative of Animal Farm is ingenious, and its twists retain a
certain charm. The plain decency of Orwell’s outlook still comes through
clearly, and his fable’s force is benign. Like his hero, the sublime Charles
Dickens, Orwell was a “free intelligence,” and his liberal passion against
ideology is now his best legacy. Our era is again ideological, and Animal
Farm now would make most sense if it satirized not the Soviet tyranny but
the political correctness that blights our universities. Those resenters of
individuality, for whom “social energies” are everything and personal
genius is nothing, are now our Napoleons and Snowballs. Orwell’s liberal-
ism finds no home in Departments of Resentment. He should have lived
to revise Animal Farm into a satire upon the way we teach now; and upon
the way most fail to learn Orwell’s longing for “free intelligence,” which
would find little to encourage it in English-speaking higher education as
we approach the Millennium. Liberal humanism and individualist
Novelists and Novels 371

anarchism are condemned by our current gender-and-power dogmatists in


the name of a new conformism. Its motto might well be: “All animals are
resentful but some are more resentful than others.”
N O V E L S
A N D

Graham Greene
N O V E L I S T S

(1904–1991)

THOUGH HE IS MUCH HONORED AS AN EMINENT CONTEMPORARY NOVELIST,


it is not yet clear that Graham Greene will survive among the greater mas-
ters of fiction, rather than among the masterful writers of adventure stories.
Henry James and Joseph Conrad seem less relevant to their disciple’s
achievement than do Rider Haggard, John Buchan, and even perhaps
Edgar Wallace. The true comparison may he to Robert Louis Stevenson,
since neither author is demeaned by such an association, though I myself
prefer Stevenson. Greene, always generous and candid, paid tribute to what
he called “Rider Haggard’s Secret.”

How seldom in the literary life do we pause to pay a debt of grat-


itude except to the great or the fashionable, who are like those
friends that we feel do us credit. Conrad, Dostoevsky, James, yes,
but we are too ready to forget such figures as A.E.W. Mason,
Stanley Weyman, and Rider Haggard, perhaps the greatest of all
who enchanted us when we were young. Enchantment is just what
this writer exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty
years have been unable to wear away: the witch Gagool screaming
as the rock-door closed and crushed her; Eric Bright-eyes fighting
his doomed battle; the death of the tyrant Chaka; Umslopagaas
holding the queen’s stairway in Milosis. It is odd how many violent
images remain like a prophecy of the future; the love passages were
quickly read and discarded from the mind, though now they seem
oddly moving (as when Queen Nyleptha declares her love to Sir
Henry Curtis in the midnight hall), a little awkward and stilted
perhaps, but free from ambiguities and doubts, and with the worn
rhetoric of honesty.

372
Novelists and Novels 373

To be “free from ambiguities and doubts and, with the worn rhetoric
of honesty,” to express love—that is the hopeless nostalgia of Greene’s pro-
tagonists, and of Greene himself. Greene tells us that he had a happy child-
hood, and a sad adolescence, and what he finds in Rider Haggard is a child-
hood vision, rather than an adolescent fantasy. Of Haggard’s life, Greene
observed that it “does not belong to the unhappy world of letters; there are
no rivalries, jealousies, nerve storms, no toiling miserably against the grain,
no ignoble ambivalent vision which finds a kind of copy even in personal
grief.” I would observe, rather sadly, that what Greene describes so nega-
tively here is indeed an inescapable aspect of the creative lives of strong
writers. Inescapable because they have chosen to overcome mortality
through, in, and by their work, and such an overcoming requires rival-
ries—with figures of the past, the present, the future.
“Rider Haggard’s Secret” turns out to be, according to Greene, what
Greene least led us to expect: an obsessive fear of mortality, expressed in
an anecdote concerning Haggard and the much stronger Kipling:

There are some revealing passages in his friendship with Rudyard


Kipling. Fishing together for trout at Bateman’s, these two elder-
ly men—in some ways the most successful writers of their time,
linked together to their honour even by their enemies (“the prose
that knows no reason, and the unmelodious verse,” “When the
Rudyards cease from Kipling, and the Haggards ride no more”),
suddenly let out the secret. “I happened to remark,” Haggard
wrote, “that I thought this world was one of the hells. He replied
he did not think—he was certain of it. He went on to show that it
had every attribute of hell; doubt, fear, pain, struggle, bereave-
ment, almost irresistible temptations springing from the nature
with which we are clothed, physical and mental suffering, etc.,
ending in the worst fate man can devise for man, Execution.”

Kipling’s nihilism, akin to Walter Pater’s, was partly assuaged by


Kipling’s surprisingly Paterian devotion to stories for stories’ sake, poems
for poems’ sake. Greene’s novels and entertainments have one pervasive
fault: tendentiousness. We are never given a narrative for the narrative’s
sake, or the representation of a person for that person’s sake. I have read
no stranger criticism of Henry James than that ventured by Graham
Greene, who has contrived to persuade himself that James was essentially
a religious novelist. The Portrait of a Lady is scarcely The Heart of the Matter,
or The Wings of the Dove a version of The End of the Affair, yet Greene
seems not to know the difference. His Henry James is hardly the son of
374 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Henry James, Senior, disciple of Emerson and of Swedenborg, but rather


someone “near in spirit ... to the Roman Catholic Church.” This is too
high-handed to be funny, and too inaccurate to be excusable. As a critic,
Greene remains a minor ephebe of T.S. Eliot, the “Are you worthy to be
damned?” man, author of such tractates as After Strange Gods and The Idea
of a Christian Society. In his egregious essay, “Henry James: The Religious
Aspect,” Greene approvingly quotes Eliot on our glorious capacity for
damnation, in order to suggest that James shared Eliot’s enthusiasm for so
sublime a human possibility:

human nature is not despicable in Osmond or Densher, for they


are both capable of damnation. “It is true to say,” Mr. Eliot has
written in an essay on Baudelaire, “that the glory of man is his
capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his
capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most male-
factors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough
to be damned.” This worst cannot be said of James’s characters:
both Densher and the prince have on their faces the flush of the
flames.

That is rather severe, and leads me to an apprehension that in


Greene’s hell there are many mansions. It leads Greene to the exuberant
conclusion that Henry James “is only just prevented from being as explic-
itly religious as Dostoevsky by the fact that neither a philosophy nor a
creed ever emerged from his religious sense.” James and Dostoyevski?
Why not James and G.K. Chesterton? Or James and Evelyn Waugh? My
questions are extravagant, but not so extravagant as Greene’s, since he real-
ly means to ask the question: James and Graham Greene? There is a ready
answer which is the critical truth about Greene, despite his journalistic
idolators. The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The Quiet
American, and Greene’s other ambitious novels cannot sustain a close
rereading, and are destroyed by being compared to the major novels of
Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Greens is most himself only in the com-
pany of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, Rider Haggard’s She and
King Solomon’s Mines, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, Edgar Wallace’s
The Four Just Men, and more lastingly, Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston,
Treasure Island, Kidnapped. Of Greene’s “entertainments,” the most famous
are The Third Man and Our Man in Havana, but the best seem to me the
early group that includes This Gun for Hire, The Confidential Agent, and The
Ministry of Fear. These are finer achievements than anything by John Le
Carré, Greene’s haunted disciple, and they have retained a curious
Novelists and Novels 375

freshness that might turn out to be as permanent as the quality of


Stevenson’s romances.
Greene’s most vital “entertainments” have a Jacobean quality, remind-
ing us of his intense admiration for the tragedies of John Webster, the
thrillers of their age, together with the plays of Marston, Ford, and
Tourneur. The motto for Greene’s thrillers could be Webster’s: “I hunted
this night-piece, and it was my best.” This could also he the epigraph to
what seems to me Greene’s most enduring novel, Brighton Rock (1938),
which is on the border between an entertainment like This Gun for Hire
and his “Catholic novels,” such as The Power and the Glory and its compan-
ions. Crudely worked out as the book is, Brighton Rock has a Websterian
intensity that is displaced by piety and moralizing, however inverted, in
Greene’s most ambitious attempts to be the Catholic Henry James or
Joseph Conrad of his own time.

Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock’s protagonist, the seventeen-year-old thug Pinkie, is at once


the most memorable and the most vicious representation of a person in
Greene’s fiction. He may be regarded, ironically, as a considerable advance
in malevolence over his immediate forerunner, the killer Raven in This
Gun for Hire. Contrast the deaths of Raven and Pinkie, and you see that the
essential Graham Greene came into full existence during 1936–38:

Raven watched him with bemused eyes, trying to take aim. It was-
n’t a difficult shot, but it was almost as if he had lost interest in
killing. He was only aware of a pain and despair which was more
like a complete weariness than anything else. He couldn’t work up
any sourness, any bitterness, at his betrayal. The dark Weevil
under the storm of frozen rain flowed between him and any
human enemy. “Ah, Christ that it were possible,” but he had been
marked from his birth for this end, to be betrayed in turn by
everyone until every avenue into life was safely closed: by his
mother bleeding in the basement, by the chaplain at the home, by
the soft kids who had left it with him, by the shady doctor off
Charlotte Street. How could he have expected to escape the com-
monest betrayal of all, to go soft on a skirt? Even Kite would have
been alive now if it hadn’t been for a skirt. They all went soft at
some time or another: Penrith and Carter, Jossy and Ballard,
Barker and the Great Dane. He took aim slowly, absentmindedly,
with a curious humility, with almost a sense of companionship in
376 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

his loneliness: the trooper and Mayhew. They had all thought at
one time or another that their skirt was better than other men’s
skirts, that there was something exalted in their relation. The only
problem when you were once born was to get out of life more
neatly and expeditiously than you had entered it. For the first time
the idea of his mother’s suicide came to him without bitterness, as
he fixed his aim at the long reluctant last and Saunders shot him
in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the
form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as
a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort.
At last it came out of him, and he followed his only child into a
vast desolation.

A voice called sharply “Pinkie” and she heard somebody splash-


ing in the puddles. Footsteps ran ... she couldn’t tell where. It
seemed to her that this must be news, that this must make a dif-
ference. She couldn’t kill herself when this might mean good
news. It was as if somewhere in the darkness the will which had
governed her hand relaxed, and all the hideous forces of self-
preservation came flooding back. It didn’t seem real that she had
really intended to sit there and press the trigger. “Pinkie,” the
voice called again, and the splashing steps came nearer. She pulled
the car door open and flung the revolver far away from her
towards the damp scrub.
In the light from the stained glass she saw Dallow and the
woman—and a policeman who looked confused as if he didn’t
quite know what was happening. Somebody came softly round the
car behind her and said, “Where’s that gun? Why don’t you shoot?
Give it me.”
She said, “I threw it away.”
The others approached cautiously like a deputation. Pinkie
called out suddenly in a breaking childish voice, “You bloody
squealer, Dallow.”
“Pinkie,” Dallow said, “it’s no use. They got Prewitt.” The
policeman looked ill-at-ease like a stranger at a party.
“Where’s that gun?” Pinkie said again. He screamed with hate
and fear, “My God, have I got to have a massacre?”
She said, “I threw it away.”
She could see his face indistinctly as it leant in over the little dash-
board light. It was like a child’s, badgered, confused, betrayed: fake
years slipped away—he was whisked back towards the unhappy
Novelists and Novels 377

playground. He said, “You little ...” he didn’t finish—the deputation


approached, he left her, diving into his pocket for something.
“Come on, Dallow,” he said, “you bloody squealer,” and put his
hand up. Then she couldn’t tell what happened: glass—some-
where—broke, he screamed and she saw his face—steam. He
screamed and screamed, with his hands up to his eyes; he turned
and ran; she saw a police baton at his feet and broken glass. He
looked half his size, doubled up in appalling agony: it was as if the
flames had literally got him and he shrank—shrank into a school-
boy flying in panic and pain, scrambling over a fence, running on.
“Stop him,” Dallow cried: it wasn’t any good: he was at the
edge, he was over: they couldn’t even hear a splash. It was as if
he’d been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence—
past or present, whipped away into zero—nothing.

Both scenes are Jacobean, and very much in the mode of Webster, but
the second, from Brighton Rock, has learned better the aesthetic lesson that
the poet of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi teaches so superbly.
Webster’s hero-villains—Bosola, Flamineo, Ludovico—flare out sublimely
as they die. They are indeed the best night-pieces that they have limned,
and they know it, which is a peculiarly negative glory, to them and to us, but
a glory nevertheless. Raven dies badly; the Jacobean groundlings would
have shrugged him off as a weak wastrel. If your only issue is your death,
if your only mark is “to get out of life more neatly and expeditiously than
you had entered it,” why then you have no greatness, no bad eminence that
might be called the stuff of tragedy in which someone high, however hol-
low, falls downward and outward into the dark backward and abyss of time.
But Pinkie, unlike Raven, dies in the mode of Webster’s sublime
Bosola. Pinkie has the true Jacobean hero-villain’s inverted Puritanism:
disgust for human sexuality, hatred of mere life, “his virginity straightened
in him like sex.” Born a Catholic, Pinkie is somewhere between a repressed
Jansenist and a crazed Manichaean, always ready for one death after anoth-
er, a more than Eliotic believer in the glory of his own damnation. Quite
literally, Pinkie dies a flaming death as he falls into nothingness, his face on
fire as he goes off the cliff, memorably consumed by his own hatred of
every existence, his own most of all.
The strength of Brighton Rock, which is likely to assure its perma-
nence, is that it is all one thing, Greene’s shot out of hell, as it were. Pinkie
persuades us as I believe that the nameless whiskey priest in The Power and
the Glory and Scobie the colonial policeman in The Heart of the Matter
cannot. The problem is hardly what several critics have asserted it to be:
378 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the difficulty of representing vexed goodness or flawed sainthood as con-


trasted with the absolute moral depravity of the young devil Pinkie.
Rather, it is the aesthetic question of just what Greene’s creative exuber-
ance is, and just how such gusto contrives to manifest itself in the repre-
sentation of human qualities. Scobie and the whiskey priest move Greene,
but they do not enchant him. His imagination is moved by Pinkie, because
only Pinkie sustains the vision of evil that kindled Greene into narrative art
in his most vital years as a story-teller.
However out of sympathy one is with the Eliotic mode of neo-
Christianity, and I cannot imagine a critic who cares less for its aesthetic
embodiment than my sad self, Brighton Rock has the strength of pathos that
overcomes the critic’s resentment of theological tendentiousness. I think
always, in this regard, of the end of part six of Brighton Rock, where Pinkie
has “such a vision of the street / as the street hardly understands,” a vision
deeply indebted to Eliot’s superb “preludes,” with their “notion of some
infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing,” and their phantasmagoria in
which “the worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant
lots.” Pinkie sees what can be seen, and experiences the “horrified fascina-
tion” of the damned, as they contemplate the saved:

He was taken by a craving for air, walked softly to the door. In the
passage he could see nothing: it was full of the low sound of
breathing—from the room he had left, from Dallow’s room. He
felt like a blind man watched by people he couldn’t see. He felt his
way to the stair-head and on down to the hall, step by step, creak-
ingly. He put out his hand and touched the telephone, then with
his arm outstretched made for the door. In the street the lamps
were out, but the darkness no longer enclosed between four walls
seemed to thin out across the vast expanse of a city. He could see
basement railings, a cat moving, and, reflected on the dark sky, the
phosphorescent glow of the sea. It was a strange world: he had
never been alone in it before. He had a deceptive sense of freedom
as he walked softly down towards the Channel.
The lights were on in Montpellier Road. Nobody was about, and
an empty milk bottle stood outside a gramophone shop; far down
were the illuminated clock tower and the public lavatories. The air
was fresh like country air. He could imagine he had escaped. He
put his hands for warmth into his trouser-pockets and felt a scrap
of paper which should not have been there. He drew it out—a
scrap torn from a notebook—big, unformed, stranger’s writing. He
held it up into the grey light and read—with difficulty. “I love you,
Novelists and Novels 379

Pinkie. I don’t care what you do. I love you for ever. You’ve been
good to me. Wherever you go, I’ll go too.” She must have written
it while he talked to Cubitt and slipped it into his pocket while he
slept. He crumpled it in his fist: a dustbin stood outside a fish-
monger’s—then he held his hand. An obscure sense told him you
never knew—it might prove useful one day.
He heard a whisper, looked sharply round, and thrust the paper
back. In an alley between two shops, an old woman sat upon the
ground; he could just see the rotting and discoloured face: it was
like the sight of damnation. Then he heard the whisper, “Blessed
art thou among women,” saw the grey fingers fumbling at the
beads. This was not one of the damned: he watched with horrified
fascination: this was one of the saved.

This was Greene’s true sense of the heart of the matter, and his abid-
ing vision of what could touch him, with full authenticity, as the power and
the glory. His more celebrated novels fade already into the continuum of
literary tradition. Brighton Rock, a terrible crystal of a book, may well be
The White Devil of our era.
N O V E L S
A N D

Robert Penn Warren


N O V E L I S T S

(1905–1989)

ROBERT PENN WARREN, BORN APRIL 24, 1905, IN GUTHRIE, KENTUCKY, AT


the age of eighty our most eminent man of letters. That truism is vitalized
by his extraordinary persistence of development into a great poet. A read-
er thinks of the handful of poets triumphant in their later or last phases:
Browning, Hardy, Yeats, Stevens, Warren. Indeed, “Myth of Mountain
Sunrise,” the final poem among the new work in this fifth Warren Selected
Poems, will remind some readers of Browning’s marvelous “Prologue” to
Asolando, written when the poet was seventy-seven. Thinking back fifty
years to the first time he saw Asolo, a village near Venice, Browning burns
through every sense of loss to a final transcendence:

How many a year, my Asolo,


Since—one step just from sea to land—
I found you, loved yet feared you so—
For natural objects seemed to stand
Palpably fire-clothed! No—

“God is it who transcends,” Browning ends by asserting. Warren, older


even than Browning was, also ruggedly remains a poet of immanence, of
something indwelling and pervasive, though not necessarily sustaining, that
can be sensed in, for example, a mountain sunrise:

The curdling agony of interred dark strives dayward, in stone


strives though
No light here enters, has ever entered but

380
Novelists and Novels 381

In ageless age of primal flame. But look! All mountains want


slowly to bulge outward extremely. The leaf, whetted on light,
will cut
Air like butter. Leaf cries: “I feel my deepest filament in dark
rejoice.
I know the density of basalt has a voice.”

Two primal flames, Browning’s and Warren’s, but at the close of


“Myth of Mountain Sunrise” we read not “God is it who transcends” but
“The sun blazes over the peak. That will be the old tale told.” The epi-
graph to the new section of this Selected Poems is from Warren’s favorite
theologian, St. Augustine: “Will ye not now after that life is descended
down to you, will not you ascend up to it and live?” One remembers anoth-
er epigraph Warren took from the Confessions, for the book of poems Being
Here (1980): “I thirst to know the power and nature of time.” Warren now
has that knowledge, and his recent poems show him ascending up to living
in the present, in the presence of time’s cumulative power. Perhaps no sin-
gle new poem here quite matches the extraordinary group of visions and
meditations in his previous work that includes “Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre
of Youth,” “Heart of Autumn,” “Evening Hawk,” “Birth of Love,” “The
Leaf,” “Mortmain,” “To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress,”
and so many more. But the combined strength of the eighty-five pages of
new poems that Warren aptly calls Altitudes and Extensions is remarkable,
and extends the altitudes at which our last poet of the Sublime continues
to live, move and have his being.

II

Warren’s first book was John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929). I
have just read it, for the first time, and discovered, without surprise, that it
made me very unhappy. The book purports to be history, but is Southern fic-
tion of Allen Tate’s ideology, and portrays Brown as a murderous nihilist, fit
hero for the equally repellent Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed I find it diffi-
cult to decide, after suffering the book, whether the young Warren loathed
Brown or Emerson more. Evidently both Brown and his intellectual sup-
porter seemed to represent for Warren an emptiness making ruthless and
passionate attempts to prove itself fullness. But John Brown, if read as a first
work of fiction, does presage the Warren of Night Rider (1939), his first pub-
lished novel, which I have just re-read with great pleasure.
Night Rider is an exciting and remorseless narrative, wholly character-
istic of what were to be Warren’s prime virtues as a novelist: good story-
382 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

telling and intensely dramatic unfolding of the moral character of his


doom-eager men and women. Mr. Munn, upon whom Night Rider centers,
is as splendidly unsympathetic as the true Warren heroes continued to be:
Jerry Calhoun and Slim Sarrett in At Heaven’s Gate (1943), Jack Burden
and Willie Stark in All the King’s Men (1946), Jeremiah Beaumont and
Cassius Fort in World Enough and Time (1950). When Warren’s central per-
sonages turned more amiable, starting with poor Amantha Starr in Band of
Angels (1955), the books alas turned much less interesting. This unfortu-
nate phenomenon culminated in Warren’s last novel (so far), A Place to
Come To (1977), which Warren himself ranks with All the King’s Men and
World Enough and Time. I wish I could agree, but re-reading A Place to Come
To confirms an earlier impression that Warren likes his hero, Jed
Tewksbury, rather too much. Without some real moral distaste to goad
him, Warren tends to lose his narrative drive. I find myself wishing that
Tewksbury had in him a touch of what might be called Original John
Brown.
Warren’s true precursor, as a novelist, is not Faulkner but Conrad, the
dominant influence upon so many American novelists of Warren’s genera-
tion. In one of his best critical essays, written in 1951 on Conrad’s
Nostromo, Warren gave an unwitting clue to why all his own best work, as
a novelist, already was over:

There is another discrepancy, or apparent discrepancy, that we


must confront in any serious consideration of Conrad—that
between his professions of skepticism and his professions of
faith....
Cold unconcern, an “attitude of perfect indifference” is, as he
says in the letter to Galsworthy, “the part of creative power.” But
this is the same Conrad who speaks of Fidelity and the human
communion, and who makes Kurtz cry out in the last horror and
Heyst come to his vision of meaning in life. And this is the same
Conrad who makes Marlow of “Heart of Darkness” say that what
redeems is the “idea only” ....
It is not some, but all, men who must serve the “idea.” The low-
est and the most vile creature must, in some way, idealize his exis-
tence in order to exist, and must find sanctions outside himself ....

Warren calls this a reading of Conrad’s dual temperament, skepticism


struggling with a last-ditch idealism, and remarks, much in T.S. Eliot’s
spirit:
Novelists and Novels 383

We must sometimes force ourselves to remember that the act of


creation is not simply a projection of temperament, but a criticism
and a purging of temperament.

This New Critical shibboleth becomes wholly Eliotic if we substitute


the word “personality” for the word “temperament.” As an analysis of the
moral drama in Conrad’s best novels, and in Nostromo in particular, this is
valuable, but Warren is not Conrad, and like his poetic and critical pre-
cursor, Eliot, Warren creates by projecting temperament, not by purging
it. There is no “cold unconcern,” no “attitude of perfect indifference,” no
escape from personality in Eliot, and even more nakedly Warren’s novels
and poems continually reveal his passions, prejudices, convictions. Conrad
is majestically enigmatic, beyond ideology; Warren, like Eliot, is an ideo-
logue, and his temperament is far more ferocious than Eliot’s.
What Warren rightly praises in Conrad is not to be found in Warren’s
own novels, with the single exception of All the King’s Men, which does bal-
ance skepticism against belief just adroitly enough to ward off Warren’s
moralism. World Enough and Time, Warren’s last stand as a major novelist,
is an exuberant work marred finally by the author’s singular fury at his own
creatures. As a person who forgives himself nothing, Warren abandons
Conradian skepticism and proceeds to forgive his hero and heroine noth-
ing. Re-reading World Enough and Time, I wince repeatedly at what the
novelist inflicts upon Jeremiah Beaumont and Rachel Jordan. Warren,
rather like the Gnostics’ parody of Jehovah, punishes his Adam and Eve by
denying them honorable or romantic deaths. Their joint suicide drug turns
into an emetic, and every kind of degradation subsequently is heaped upon
them. Warren, who can be a superb ironist in his novels as well as in his
poetry, nevertheless so loves the world that he will forgive it nothing; and
a poet can make more of such a position than a novelist.

All the King’s Men

I first read All the King’s Men as a Cornell undergraduate in the late 1940s,
under the tutelage of a great teacher, William M. Sale, who remarked of
the book that it had nearly every possible flaw, but that it was also unmis-
takably part of the permanent tradition or canon of the American novel.
Sale’s canonical judgment, uttered only two or three years after the novel’s
first publication (1946) has been confirmed. Rereading the book now,
nearly forty years after first studying it, I marvel at its triumph over the
author’s restless temperament. Too passionate a moralist, perhaps too great
a visionary, to cultivate the patience of a novelist, Warren instead became
384 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

a major poet, probably our finest since the death of Wallace Stevens. All
the King’s Men is likely to be his principal legacy after the extraordinary
poetry he has written in the two decades since 1966.
Remembering All the King’s Men, I had thought of it as Willie Stark’s
story; rereading it, I see that it is far more Jack Burden’s than it is Stark’s.
Warren is ambivalent enough towards Stark; in regard to Burden,
“ambivalence” seems almost too weak a term for Warren’s stance. The
author nearly identifies himself with his narrator, yet that identification is
dialectical in the mode of what Freud called “negation.” Burden is
Warren’s burden: a cognitive return of the repressed while the affective
aspect of repression continues. The mind of Robert Penn Warren at
meridian is introjected as Jack Burden, while the passional life of Warren,
domain of the drives, is projected and so spit out as Burden, morally reject-
ed by his creator, in a way that Willie Stark is not, if only because Stark is
stark—strong and active—where Burden is weak and passive, a burden to
himself and to others.
Yet he remains, to me, Warren’s most interesting fictive person, per-
haps because he is and is not Warren, the portrait of the artist as a failed
(momentarily) youngish man. One of the hidden splendors, tawdry yet fas-
cinating, of the novel is Burden’s failed first marriage (as it will prove to be,
since at the end, he does marry Anne Stanton). The truth of the first mar-
riage emerges with a fine clarity in the famous sentence that ends Burden’s
account of it: “Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to
you.” The bitterness is only towards the self, for only the self existed.
When he cannot bring the past alive into the present, then Burden
becomes a pure solipsist, aware neither of neighbors nor of the sun.
It is the peculiar strength of Willie Stark that he breaks through
Burden’s defenses sufficiently so that the novel’s narrator becomes at most
an imperfect solipsist, brilliantly capable of telling an intensely dramatic
story. All the King’s Men’s prime literary virtue is the wonderfully old-fash-
ioned one of being compulsively readable. That this is wholly due to Willie
Stark is unquestionable. He is one of the last authentic hero-villains of the
high Jacobean mode, worthy of a twentieth-century John Webster, or of
Faulkner, or even of Conrad. Burden’s relation to Stark is not that of
Conrad’s Marlow to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, or of Faulkner’s Quentin
to Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, but rather is that of Warren himself to the
historical figure of the Kingfish, Huey Long of Louisiana. This necessari-
ly has caused some confusions in the critical apprehension of All the King’s
Men. Burden’s barely repressed love for Stark, essentially filial in nature,
does not represent Warren’s hidden fondness for the most persuasive of
our country’s native Fascists, our Franco or Mussolini, as it were. Rather,
Novelists and Novels 385

Stark’s fascination for Warren is dramatic, and aesthetic, even as it is for us


as Warren’s readers.
The movement from the factual, historical Huey Long to the fictive
Willie Stark is epitomized by the difference between Long’s “I know the
hearts of the people because I have not colored my own” and Stark’s “My
study is the heart of the people.” Willie is pithier than Huey, and even
more persuasive. He is the answer to a universal Oedipus complex, an
answer conveyed most poignantly in the novel’s central moment, the final
meeting between Jack Burden and his crucial father-substitute, Willie
Stark, dying but still the Boss:

He lifted the forefinger and the next finger of his right hand,
which lay prone on the sheet, in an incipient salute, then let them
drop. The strength of the muscles which held his mouth twisted
gave out, too, and the grin slid off his face and the weight of flesh
sagged back.
I stood up close to the bed and looked down at him, and tried
to think of something to say. But my brain felt as juiceless as an
old sponge left out in the sun a long time.
Then he said, in something a little better than a whisper, “I
wanted to see you, Jack.”
“I wanted to see you, too, Boss.”
For a minute he didn’t speak, but his eyes looked up at me, with
the light still flickering in them. Then he spoke: “Why did he do
it to me?”
“Oh, God damn it,” I burst out, very loud, “I don’t know. “
The nurse looked warningly at me.
“I never did anything to him,” he said.
“No, you never did.”
He was silent again, and the flicker went down in his eyes.
Then, “He was all right. The Doc.”
I nodded.
I waited, but it began to seem that he wasn’t going to say any
more. His eyes were on the ceiling and I could scarcely tell that he
was breathing. Finally, the eyes turned toward me again, very
slowly, and I almost thought that I could hear the tiny painful
creak of the balls in their sockets. But the light flickered up again.
He said, “It might have been all different, Jack.”
I nodded again.
He roused himself more. He even seemed to be straining to lift
his head from the pillow. “You got to believe that,” he said hoarsely.
386 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The nurse stepped forward and looked significantly at me.


“Yes,” I said to the man on the bed.
“You got to,” he said again. “You got to believe that.”
“All right.”
He looked at me, and for a moment it was the old strong, prob-
ing, demanding glance. But when the words came this time, they
were very weak. “And it might even been different yet,” he whis-
pered. “If it hadn’t happened, it might—have been different—
even yet.”
He barely got the last words out, he was so weak.
The nurse was making signals to me.
I reached down and took the hand on the sheet. It felt like a
piece of jelly.
“So long, Boss,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t even sure that there was recog-
nition in the eyes now. I turned away and went out.

It is the father as man-of-action saying farewell to his true son as intel-


lectual or spiritual discerner, and trying, somewhat heroically, to give a
final blessing by way of expiation. For Willie Stark has been a castrating
father, and in ways that transcended his taking Anne Stanton away from
Jack Burden. “It might have—been different—even yet” is more than a
political reference or ruined social prophecy. As a reference to the buried
relationship between Stark and Burden, it implies a belated recognition of
the burden of a better fatherhood, and better filial vision, than either fig-
ure has known before. That seems the profoundest meaning of Burden’s
final rumination that concludes the novel:

We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch
young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and
walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gen-
tly in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles
thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move
among trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time
from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into
the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the
awful responsibility of Time. To go out of history into history is
to take up Time’s awful responsibility of the agon between fathers
and sons, never confronted by Stark and Burden, who evaded
their mutual recognition until it was too late.
N O V E L I S T S
Samuel Beckett

A N D
(1906–1989)

N O V E L S
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

JONATHAN SWIFT, SO MUCH THE STRONGEST IRONIST IN THE LANGUAGE AS


to have no rivals, wrote the prose masterpiece of the language in A Tale of
a Tub. Samuel Beckett, as much the legitimate descendant of Swift as he is
of his friend, James Joyce, has written the prose masterpieces of the lan-
guage in this century, sometimes as translations from his own French orig-
inals. Such an assertion does not discount the baroque splendors of Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake, but prefers to them the purity of Murphy and Watt,
and of Beckett’s renderings into English of Malone Dies, The Unnamable and
How It Is. Unlike Swift and Joyce, Beckett is only secondarily an ironist and,
despite his brilliance at tragicomedy, is something other than a comic
writer. His Cartesian dualism seems to me less fundamental than his pro-
foundly Schopenhauerian vision. Perhaps Swift, had he read and tolerated
Schopenhauer, might have turned into Beckett.
A remarkable number of the greatest novelists have found
Schopenhauer more than congenial: one thinks of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Zola,
Hardy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, even of Proust. As those seven novelists
have in common only the activity of writing novels, we may suspect that
Schopenhauer’s really horrifying system helps a novelist to do his work.
This is not to discount the intellectual and spiritual persuasiveness of
Schopenhauer. A philosopher who so deeply affected Wagner, Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein and (despite his denials) Freud, hardly can be regarded only
as a convenient aid to story-tellers and story-telling. Nevertheless,
Schopenhauer evidently stimulated the arts of fiction, but why? Certain it
is that we cannot read The World As Will and Representation as a work of

387
388 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

fiction. Who could bear it as fiction? Supplementing his book,


Schopenhauer characterizes the Will to live:

Here also life presents itself by no means as a gift for enjoyment,


but as a task, a drudgery to be performed; and in accordance with
this we see, in great and small, universal need, ceaseless cares, con-
stant pressure, endless strife, compulsory activity, with extreme
exertion of all the powers of body and mind ... All strive, some
planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ulti-
mate aim of it all, what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented
individuals through a short span of time in the most fortunate case
with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which,
however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of
this race and its striving. In this evident disproportion between the
trouble and the reward, the will to live appears to us from this
point of view, if taken objectively, as a fool, or subjectively, as a
delusion, seized by which everything living works with the utmost
exertion of its strength for something that is of no value. But when
we consider it more closely, we shall find here also that it is rather
a blind pressure, a tendency entirely without ground or motive.

Hugh Kenner suggests that Beckett reads Descartes as fiction.


Beckett’s fiction suggests that Beckett reads Schopenhauer as truth.
Descartes as a precursor is safely distant; Joyce was much too close, and
Murphy and even Watt are Joycean books. Doubtless, Beckett turned to
French in Molloy so as to exorcise Joyce, and certainly, from Malone Dies
on, the prose when translated back into English has ceased to be Joycean.
Joyce is to Beckett as Milton was to Wordsworth. Finnegans Wake, like
Paradise Lost, is a triumph demanding study; Beckett’s trilogy, like The
Prelude, internalizes the triumph by way of the compensatory imagination,
in which experience and loss become one. Study does little to unriddle
Beckett or Wordsworth. The Old Cumberland Beggar, Michael, Margaret
of The Ruined Cottage; these resist analysis as do Molloy, Malone, and the
Unnamable. Place my namesake, the sublime Poldy, in Murphy and he
might fit, though he would explode the book. Place him in Watt? It cannot
be done, and Poldy (or even Earwicker) in the trilogy would be like Milton
(or Satan) perambulating about in The Prelude.
The fashion (largely derived from French misreaders of German
thought) of denying a fixed, stable ego is a shibboleth of current criticism.
But such a denial is precisely like each literary generation’s assertion that it
truly writes the common language rather than a poetic diction. Both
Novelists and Novels 389

stances define modernism, and modernism is as old as Hellenistic


Alexandria. Callimachus is as modernist as Joyce, and Aristarchus, like
Hugh Kenner, is an antiquarian modernist or modernist antiquarian.
Schopenhauer dismissed the ego as an illusion, life as torment, and the uni-
verse as nothing, and he rightly credited these insights to that great mod-
ernist, the Buddha. Beckett too is as modernist as the Buddha, or as
Schopenhauer, who disputes with Hume the position of the best writer
among philosophers since Plato. I laugh sometimes in reading
Schopenhauer, but the laughter is defensive. Beckett provokes laughter, as
Falstaff does, or in the mode of Shakespeare’s clowns.

II

In his early monograph, Proust, Beckett cites Schopenhauer’s defini-


tion of the artistic procedure as “the contemplation of the world inde-
pendently of the principle of reason.” Such more-than-rational contem-
plation gives Proust those Ruskinian or Paterian privileged moments that
are “epiphanies” in Joyce but which Beckett mordantly calls “fetishes” in
Proust. Transcendental bursts of radiance necessarily are no part of
Beckett’s cosmos, which resembles, if anything at all, the Demiurge’s cre-
ation in ancient Gnosticism. Basilides or Valentinus, Alexandrian here-
siarchs, would have recognized instantly the world of the trilogy and of the
major plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape. It is the world
ruled by the Archons, the kenoma, non-place of emptiness. Beckett’s enig-
matic spirituality quests, though sporadically, for a void that is a fulness,
the Abyss or pleroma that the Gnostics called both forefather and fore-
mother. Call this a natural rather than a revealed Gnosticism in Beckett’s
case, but Gnosticism it is nevertheless. Schopenhauer’s quietism is at last
not Beckett’s, which is to say that for Beckett, as for Blake and for the
Gnostics, the Creation and the Fall were the same event.
The young Beckett, bitterly reviewing a translation of Rilke into
English, memorably rejected Rilke’s transcendental self-deceptions, where
the poet mistook his own tropes as spiritual evidences:

Such a turmoil of self-deception and naif discontent gains nothing


in dignity from that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which pro-
vides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God ... He has the
fidgets, a disorder which may very well give rise, as it did with
Rilke on occasion, to poetry of a high order. But why call the fidg-
ets God, Ego, Orpheus and the rest?
390 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

In 1938, the year that Murphy was belatedly published, Beckett


declared his double impatience with the language of transcendence and
with the transcendence of language, while intimating also the imminence
of the swerve away from Joyce in the composition of Watt (1942–44):

At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by


which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word,
through words. In this dissonance between the means and their
use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final
music or that silence that underlies All.
With such a program, in my opinion, the latest work of Joyce
has nothing whatever to do. There it seems rather to be a matter
of an apotheosis of the word. Unless perhaps Ascension to Heaven
and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same.

As a Gnostic imagination, Beckett’s way is Descent, in what cannot be


called a hope to liberate the sparks imprisoned in words. Hope is alien to
Beckett’s mature fiction, so that we can say its images are Gnostic but not
its program, since it lacks all program. A Gnosticism without potential
transcendence is the most negative of all possible negative stances, and
doubtless accounts for the sympathetic reader’s sense that every crucial
work by Beckett necessarily must be his last. Yet the grand paradox is that
lessness never ends in Beckett.

III

“Nothing is got for nothing.” That is the later version of Emerson’s law
of Compensation, in the essay “Power” of The Conduct of Life. Nothing is got
for nothing even in Beckett, this greatest master of nothing. In the progres-
sion from Murphy through Watt and the trilogy on to How It Is and the
briefer fictions of recent years, there is loss for the reader as well as gain. The
same is true of the movement from Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape
down to the short plays of Beckett’s current and perhaps final phase. A wild
humor abandons Beckett, or is transformed into a comedy for which we
seem not to be ready. Even an uncommon reader can long for those mar-
velous Pythagoreans, Wylie and Neary, who are the delight of Murphy, or
for the sense of the picturesque that makes a last stand in Molloy. Though the
mode was Joyce’s, the music of Wylie and Neary is Beckett’s alone:

“These are dark sayings,” said Wylie.


Neary turned his cup upside down.
Novelists and Novels 391

“Needle,” he said, “as it is with the love of the body, so with the
friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to
the most retired places. Here are the pudenda of my psyche.”
“Cathleen,” cried Wylie.
“But betray me,” said Neary; “and you go the way of Hippasos.”
“The Adkousmatic, I presume,” said Wylie. “His retribution slips
my mind.”
“Drowned in a puddle,” said Neary, “for having divulged the
incommensurability of side and diagonal.”
“So perish all babblers,” said Wylie....
“Do not quibble,” said Neary harshly. “You saved my life. Now
palliate it.”
“I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is
too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased,
another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed sys-
tem. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”
“Very prettily put,” said Neary.

One can be forgiven for missing this, even as one surrenders these eas-
ier pleasures for the more difficult pleasures of How It Is:

my life above what I did in my life above a little of everything tried


everything then gave up no worse always a hole a ruin always a
crust never any good at anything not made for that farrago too
complicated crawl about in comers and sleep all I wanted I got it
nothing left but go to heaven

The Sublime mode, according to a great theorist, Angus Fletcher, has


“the direct and serious function of destroying the slavery of pleasure.”
Beckett is certainly the strongest Western author living in the year 1985,
the last survivor of the sequence that includes Proust, Kafka and Joyce. It
seems odd to name Beckett, most astonishing of minimalists, as a repre-
sentative of the Sublime mode, but the isolation and terror of the High
Sublime return in the catastrophe creations of Beckett, in that vision
Fletcher calls “catastrophe as a gradual grinding down and slowing to a
dead stop.” A Sublime that moves towards silence necessarily relies upon a
rhetoric of waning lyricism, in which the entire scale of effects is trans-
formed, as John Hollander notes:

Sentences, phrases, images even, are the veritable arias in the plays
and the later fiction. The magnificent rising of the kite at the end
392 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

of Murphy occurs in a guarded but positive surge of ceremonial


song, to which he will never return.

Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus, who had been glad to live and was glad to
die, tells us that: “I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her mar-
riage dress. I lay and waited. Then came the mishap.” The mishap, a
moment’s error on the part of the death-ship’s pilot, moves Gracchus from
the heroic world of romance to the world of Kafka and of Beckett, where
one is neither alive nor dead. It is Beckett’s peculiar triumph that he dis-
putes with Kafka the dark eminence of being the Dante of that world. Only
Kafka, or Beckett, could have written the sentence in which Gracchus
sums up the dreadfulness of his condition: “The thought of helping me is
an illness that has to be cured by taking to one’s bed.” Murphy might have
said that; Malone is beyond saying anything so merely expressionistic. The
“beyond” is where Beckett’s later fictions and plays reside. Call it the
silence, or the abyss, or the reality beyond the pleasure principle, or the
metaphysical or spiritual reality of our existence at last exposed, beyond
further illusion. Beckett cannot or will not name it, but he has worked
through to the art of representing it more persuasively than anyone else.
N O V E L I S T S
Richard Wright

A N D
(1908–1960)

N O V E L S
Native Son

WHAT REMAINS OF RICHARD WRIGHT’S WORK IF WE APPLY TO IT ONLY


aesthetic standards of judgment? This is to assume that strictly aesthetic
standards exist, and that we know what they are. Wright, in Native Son,
essentially the son of Theodore Dreiser, could not rise always even to
Dreiser’s customarily bad level of writing. Here is Bigger Thomas, con-
demned to execution, at the start of his death vigil:

In self-defense he shut out the night and day from his mind, for if
he had thought of the sun’s rising and setting, of the moon or the
stars, of clouds or rain, he would have died a thousand deaths
before they took him to the chair. To accustom his mind to death
as much as possible, he made all the world beyond his cell a vast
gray land where neither night nor day was, peopled by strange
men and women whom he could not understand, but with those
lives he longed to mingle once before he went.
He did not eat now; he simply forced food down his throat
without tasting it, to keep the gnawing pain of hunger away, to
keep from feeling dizzy. And he did not sleep; at intervals he closed
his eyes for a while, no matter what the hour, then opened them at
some later time to resume his brooding. He wanted to be free of
everything that stood between him and his end, him and the full
and terrible realization that life was over without meaning, with-
out anything being settled, without conflicting impulses being
resolved.

393
394 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

If we isolate these paragraphs, then we do not know the color or back-


ground of the man awaiting execution. The intense sociological pathos of
Wright’s narrative vanishes, and we are left in the first paragraph with an
inadequate rhetoric: “shut out the night and day,” “died a thousand
deaths,” “a vast gray land,” “strange men and women,” “with those lives he
longed to mingle.” Yet the second paragraph is even more unsatisfactory,
as the exact word is nowhere: “gnawing pain of hunger,” “resume his
brooding,” “full and terrible realization,” “conflicting impulses being
resolved.” Wright’s narrative requires from him at this point some mode of
language that would individuate Bigger’s dread, that would catch and fix
the ordeal of a particular black man condemned by a white society.
Unfortunately, Wright’s diction does not allow us even to distinguish
Bigger’s horror from any other person’s apprehension of judicial murder.
Nor does Bigger’s own perspective enter into Wright’s rhetorical stance.
The problem is not so much Wright’s heritage from Dreiser’s reductive
naturalism as it is, plainly stated, a bad authorial ear.
It is rather too late to make so apparently irrelevant an observation,
since Wright has become a canonical author, for wholesome societal pur-
poses, with which I am happy to concur. Rereading Native Son or Black Boy
cannot be other than an overdetermined activity, since Wright is a univer-
sally acknowledged starting point for black literature in contemporary
America. Canonical critics of Wright speak of him as a pioneer, a man of
rare courage, as a teacher and forerunner. None of this can or should be
denied. I myself would praise him for will, force, and drive, human attrib-
utes that he carried just over the border of aesthetic achievement, without
alas getting very far once he had crossed over. His importance transcends
the concerns of a strictly literary criticism, and reminds the critic of the
claims of history, society, political economy, and the longer records of
oppression and injustice that history continues to scant.

II

Bigger Thomas can be said to have become a myth without first hav-
ing been a convincing representation of human character and personality.
Wright listed five “Biggers” he had encountered in actuality, five violent
youths called “bad Niggers” by the whites. The most impressive, Bigger
No. 5, was a knife-wielding, prideful figure “who always rode the Jim
Crow streetcars without paying and sat wherever he pleased.” For this
group of precursors of his own protagonist in Native Son, Wright gave us
a moving valediction:
Novelists and Novels 395

The Bigger Thomases were the only Negroes I know of who con-
sistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away
with it, at least for a sweet brief spell. Eventually, the whites who
restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price. They were
shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they
were either dead or their spirits broken.

Wright concluded this same “Introduction” to Native Son with his own
vision of the United States as of March 7, 1940:

I feel that I’m lucky to be alive to write novels today, when the
whole world is caught in the pangs of war and change. Early
American writers, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne, com-
plained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American
scene. But I think that if they were alive, they’d feel at home in
modern America. True, we have no great church in America; our
national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to
brag of them; and we have no army that’s above the level of mer-
cenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our
country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich sym-
bols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, indus-
trial civilization. But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of
a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a
James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow
athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even
the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he
would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.

The citation of James, Hawthorne, and Poe is gratuitous, and the per-
spective upon the United States in the months preceding the fall of France
lacks authority and precision, even in its diction. But the dense and heavy
shadow athwart our national life indubitably was there, always had been
there, and for many is there still. That shadow is Richard Wright’s mythol-
ogy, and his embryonic strength. He was not found by Henry James, or by
Hawthorne, or by Poe, and scarcely would have benefitted by such a find-
ing. A legitimate son of Theodore Dreiser, he nevertheless failed to write
in Native Son a Sister Carrie or a new version of An American Tragedy. The
reality of being a gifted young black in the United States of the thirties and
forties proved too oppressive for the limited purposes of a narrative fiction.
Rereading Native Son is an experience of renewing the dialectical aware-
ness of history and society, but is not in itself an aesthetic experience.
396 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

And yet, I do not think that Native Son, and its reception, present us
with a merely aesthetic dilemma. In the “afterword” to the current paper-
back reprint of Native Son, one of Wright’s followers, John Reilly, defends
Bigger Thomas by asserting that: “The description of Mary’s murder
makes clear that the white world is the cause of the violent desires and
reactions” that led Bigger to smother poor Mary. I would think that what
the description makes clear enough is that Bigger is indeed somewhat
overdetermined, but to ascribe the violence of his desires and reactions to
any context whatsoever is to reduce him to the status of a replicant or of a
psychopathic child. The critical defenders of Native Son must choose.
Either Bigger Thomas is a responsible consciousness, and so profoundly
culpable, or else only the white world is responsible and culpable, which
means however that Bigger ceases to be of fictive interest and becomes an
ideogram, rather than a persuasive representation of a possible human
being. Wright, coming tragically early in what was only later to become his
own tradition, was not able to choose, and so left us with something
between an ideological image, and the mimesis of an actuality.

III

I remember reading Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth when


Wright’s autobiographical book first appeared, in 1945. A boy of fifteen, I
was frightened and impressed by the book. Reading it again after more
than forty years, the old reactions do not return. Instead, I am compelled
to ask the Nietzschean question: who is the interpreter, and what power
does he seek to gain over the text, whether it be his own text or the text of
his life? Wright, an anguished and angry interpreter, wrote a far more
political work in Black Boy than in Native Son. What passes for a Marxist
analysis of the relation between society and Bigger Thomas seems to me
always a kind of authorial afterthought in Native Son. In Black Boy, this
pseudo-Marxism usurps the narrator’s function, and the will-to-power
over interpretation becomes the incessant undersong of the entire book.
Contrast the opening and closing paragraphs of Black Boy:

One winter morning in the long-ago, four-year-old days of my life


I found myself standing before a fireplace, warming my hands
over a mound of glowing coals, listening to the wind whistle past
the house outside. All morning my mother had been scolding me,
telling me to keep still, warning me that I must make no noise.
And I was angry, fretful, and impatient. In the next room Granny
lay ill and under the day and night care of a doctor and I knew that
Novelists and Novels 397

I would be punished if I did not obey. I crossed restlessly to the


window and pushed back the long fluffy white curtains—which I
had been forbidden to touch—and looked yearningly out into the
empty street. I was dreaming of running and playing and shout-
ing, but the vivid image of Granny’s old, white, wrinkled, grim
face, framed by a halo of tumbling black hair, lying upon a huge
feather pillow, made me afraid.

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I
headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with
dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that
men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame,
and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win
some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered
here beneath the stars.

The young man going North, scarred and watchful, in search of


redemption by meaning, has remarkably little connection with the four-
year-old boy, impatient for the dream of running, playing, and shouting.
Wright’s purpose is to explain his fall from impulse into care, and his
inevitable explanation will be social and historical. Yet much that he loses
is to his version of the family romance, as he himself describes it, and some
of what vanishes from him can be ascribed, retrospectively, to a purely per-
sonal failure; in him the child was not the father of the man.
What survives best in Black Boy, for me, is Wright’s gentle account of
his human rebirth, as a writer. At eighteen, reading Mencken, he learns
audacity, the agonistic use of language, and an aggressive passion for study
comes upon him. After reading the Main Street of Sinclair Lewis, he is
found by the inevitable precursor in Theodore Dreiser:

“That’s deep stuff you’re reading, boy.”


“I’m just killing time, sir.”
“You’ll addle your brains if you don’t watch out.”
I read Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie and they
revived in me a vivid sense of my mother’s suffering; I was over-
whelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It
would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I
derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of
life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the natural-
ism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.
Steeped in new moods and ideas, I bought a ream of paper and
398 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

tried to write; but nothing would come, or what did come was flat
beyond telling. I discovered that more than desire and feeling
were necessary to write and I dropped the idea. Yet I still won-
dered how it was possible to know people sufficiently to write
about them? Could I ever learn about life and people? To me, with
my vast ignorance, my Jim Crow station in life, it seemed a task
impossible of achievement. I now knew what being a Negro
meant. I could endure the hunger. I had learned to live with hate.
But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath
of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else
hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.

Dreiser’s taut visions of suffering women renew in Wright his own


memories of his mother’s travails, and make him one of those authors for
whom the purpose of the poem (to cite Wallace Stevens) is the mother’s
face. There is an Oedipal violence in Wright that sorts strangely with his
attempt to persuade us, and himself, that all violence is socially overdeter-
mined. Black Boy, even now, performs an ethical function for us by serving
as a social testament, as Wright intended it to do. We can hope that, some
day, the book will be available to us as a purely individual testament, and
then, may read very differently.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
William Golding
(1911–1993)

N O V E L S
Lord of the Flies

POPULAR AS IT CONTINUES TO BE, LORD OF THE FLIES ESSENTIALLY IS A


period piece. Published in 1954, it is haunted by William Golding’s service
in the Royal Navy (1940–45), during the Second World War. The hazards
of the endless battles of the North Atlantic against German submarines
culminated in Golding’s participation in D-Day, the Normandy invasion of
June 6, 1944. Though Lord of the Flies is a moral parable in the form of a
boys’ adventure story, in a deeper sense it is a war story. The book’s central
emblem is the dead parachutist, mistaken by the boys for the Beast
Beelzebub, diabolic Lord of the Flies. For Golding, the true shape of
Beelzebub is a pig’s head on a stick, and the horror of war is transmuted
into the moral brutality implicit (in his view) in most of us. The dead para-
chutist, in Golding’s own interpretation, represents History, one war after
another, the dreadful gift adults keep presenting to children. Golding’s
overt intention has some authority, but not perhaps enough to warrant our
acceptance of so simplistic a symbol.
Judging Lord of the Flies a period piece means that one doubts its long-
range survival, if only because it is scarcely a profound vision of evil.
Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies does not sustain a critical comparison
with his best narratives: The Inheritors, Pincher Martin (his masterpiece),
Free Fall, and the much later Darkness Visible. All these books rely upon
nuance, irony, intelligence, and do not reduce to a trite moral allegory.
Golding acknowledged the triteness, yet insisted upon his fable’s truth:

Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is


sinful and his state perilous. I accept the theology and admit the

399
400 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

triteness; but what is trite is true; and a truism can become more
than a truism when it is a belief passionately held.

Passion is hardly a standard of measurement in regard to truth. Lord of the


Flies aspires to be a universal fable, but its appeal to American school-chil-
dren partly inheres in its curious exoticism. Its characters are implausible
because they are humorless; even one ironist among them would explode
the book. The Christ-like Simon is particularly unconvincing; Golding
does not know how to portray the psychology of a saint. Whether indeed,
in his first novel, he knew how to render anyone’s psychology is disputable.
His boys are indeed British private school boys: regimented, subjected to
vicious discipline, and indoctrinated with narrow, restrictive views of
human nature. Golding’s long career as a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s
School in Salisbury was a kind of extension of his Naval service: a passage
from one mode of indoctrination and strict discipline to another. The
regression to savagery that marks Lord of the Flies is a peculiarly British
scholastic phenomenon, and not a universal allegory of moral depravity.
By indicating the severe limitations of Golding’s first novel, I do not
intend to deny its continued cultural value. Any well-told tale of a rever-
sion to barbarism is a warning against tendencies in many groups that may
become violent, and such a warning remains sadly relevant as we approach
Millennium. Though in itself a non-event, the year 2000 will arouse some
odd expectations among extremists, particularly in the United States, most
millennial of nations. Golding’s allegorical fable is no Gulliver’s Travels; the
formidable Swiftian irony and savage intellectualism are well beyond
Golding’s powers. Literary value has little sway in Lord of the Flies. Ralph,
Piggy, Simon, and Jack are ideograms, rather than achieved fictive charac-
ters. Compare them to Kipling’s Kim, and they are sadly diminished;
invoke Huck Finn, and they are reduced to names on a page. Lord of the
Flies matters, not in or for itself, but because of its popularity in an era that
continues to find it a useful admonition.
N O V E L I S T S
Albert Camus

A N D
(1913–1960)

N O V E L S
The Stranger

SARTRE REMAINS THE CLASSIC COMMENTATOR UPON CAMUS, WHOM HE


assimilated to Pascal, to Rousseau, and to other French moralists, “the pre-
cursors of Nietzsche.” To Sartre, Camus was “very much at peace within
disorder,” and so The Stranger was “a classical work, an orderly work, com-
posed about the absurd and against the absurd.” Shrewdly, Sartre finally
assigned The Stranger not to the company of Heidegger or Hemingway, but
to that of Zadig and Candide, the tales of Voltaire. Rereading Camus’s short
novel after forty years, I marvel at Sartre’s keen judgment, and find it very
difficult to connect my present impression of the book with my memory of
how it seemed then. What Germaine Brée termed its heroic and humanis-
tic hedonism seems, with the years, to have dwindled into an evasive hedo-
nism, uncertain of its own gestures. The bleak narrative retains its
Hemingwayesque aura, but the narrator, Meursault, seems even smaller
now than he did four decades ago, when his dry disengagement had a cer-
tain novelty. Time, merciless critic, has worn The Stranger rather smooth,
without however quite obliterating the tale.
René Girard, the most Jansenist of contemporary critics, “retried” The
Stranger, and dissented from the verdict of “innocent” pronounced by
Camus upon Meursault:

If supernatural necessity is present in L’Étranger, why should


Meursault alone come under its power? Why should the various
characters in the same novel be judged by different yardsticks? If
the murderer is not held responsible for his actions, why should
the judges be held responsible for theirs?

401
402 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Girard is reacting to an unfortunate comment by Camus himself: “A


man who does not cry at the funeral of his mother is likely to be sentenced
to death.” In Girard’s judgment, the quest of Camus was to convince us
that judgment of guilt is always wrong. Girard calls this an “egotistical
Manichaeism” and convicts Camus of “literary solipsism,” particularly in
one devastating sentence: “Camus betrays solipsism when he writes
L’Étranger just as Meursault betrays it when he murders the Arab.” On this
reading, the “innocent murder” is a metaphor for the creative process.
Meursault is a bad child and Camus becomes as a child again when he
writes Meursault’s novel. Girard considers the novel an aesthetic success,
but a morally immature work, since Meursault himself is guilty of judg-
ment, though Camus wishes his protagonist not to be judged. “The world
in which we live is one of perpetual judgment,” Girard reminds us, in
Pascalian vein. For Girard, the figures comparable to Meursault are
Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Dimitri Karamazov. For Camus, those fig-
ures presumably were Kafka’s Joseph K, and K the land surveyor. Either
comparison destroys The Stranger, which has trouble enough competing
with Malraux and Hemingway. Against Girard, I enter my own dissent.
The Stranger is barely able to sustain an aesthetic dignity and certainly is
much slighter than we thought it to be. But it is not morally flawed or
inconsistent. In its cosmos, guilt and innocence are indistinguishable, and
Jewish or Christian judgments are hopelessly irrelevant. Meursault is not,
as Girard says, a juvenile delinquent, but an inadequate consciousness
dazed by the sun, overwhelmed by a context that is too strong for him:

On seeing me, the Arab raised himself a little, and his hand went
to his pocket. Naturally, I gripped Raymond’s revolver in the
pocket of my coat. Then the Arab let himself sink back again, but
without taking his hand from his pocket. I was some distance off,
at least ten yards, and most of the time I saw him as a blurred dark
form wobbling in the heat haze. Sometimes, however, I had
glimpses of his eyes glowing between the half-closed lids. The
sound of the waves was even lazier, feebler, than at noon. But the
light hadn’t changed; it was pounding as fiercely as ever on the
long stretch of sand that ended at the rock. For two hours the sun
seemed to have made no progress; becalmed in a sea of molten
steel. Far out on the horizon a steamer was passing; I could just
make out from the corner of an eye the small black moving patch,
while I kept my gaze fixed on the Arab.
It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and
think no more about it. But the whole beach, pulsing with heat,
Novelists and Novels 403

was pressing on my back. I took some steps toward the stream.


The Arab didn’t move. After all, there was still some distance
between us. Perhaps because of the shadow on his face, he seemed
to be grinning at me.
I waited. The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads
of sweat were gathering in my eyebrows. It was just the same sort
of heat as at my mother’s funeral, and I had the same disagreeable
sensations—especially in my forehead, where all the veins seemed
to be bursting through the skin. I couldn’t stand it any longer, and
took another step forward. I knew it was a fool thing to do; I
wouldn’t get out of the sun by moving on a yard or so. But I took
that step, just one step, forward. And then the Arab drew his knife
and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight.
A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a
long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all
the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on
my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath
a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious
only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less dis-
tinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scar-
ring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.
Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust
came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end,
and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every
nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the
revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt
jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all
began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew
I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this
beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into
the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each suc-
cessive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undo-
ing.

The “absurd” and the “gratuitous” seem wrong categories to apply


here. We have a vision of possession by the sun, an inferno that fuses con-
sciousness and will into a single negation, and burns through it to purpos-
es that may exist, but are not human. Gide’s Lafcadio, a true absurdist, said
he was not curious about events but about himself, while Meursault is not
curious about either. What Meursault at the end calls “the benign indif-
ference of the universe” is belied by the pragmatic malevolence of the sun.
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The true influence upon The Stranger seems to me Melville’s Moby-Dick,


and for the whiteness of the whale Camus substitutes the whiteness of the
sun. Meursault is no quester, no Ahab, and Ahab would not have allowed
him aboard the Pequod. But the cosmos of The Stranger is essentially the
cosmos of Moby-Dick; though in many of its visible aspects Meursault’s
world might seem to have been formed in love, its invisible spheres were
formed in fright. The Jansenist Girard is accurate in finding Gnostic hints
in the world of Camus, but not so accurate in judging Camus to possess
only a bad child’s sense of innocence. Judging Meursault is as wasteful as
judging his judges; that blinding light of the sun bums away all judgment.

The Plague

Forty years after its initial publication, Camus’s The Plague (1947) has
taken on a peculiar poignance in the era of our new plague, the ambigu-
ously named AIDS. The Plague is a tendentious novel, more so even than
The Stranger. A novelist requires enormous exuberance to sustain tenden-
tiousness; Dostoevsky had such exuberance, Camus did not. Or a master of
evasions, like Kafka, can evade his own compulsions, but Camus is all too
interpretable. The darkest comparison would be to Beckett, whose trilogy
of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable conveys a sense of menace and
anguish, metaphysical and psychological, that dwarfs The Plague.
Oran, spiritually rejecting the healthy air of the Mediterranean, in
some sense brings the Plague upon itself; indeed Oran is the Plague, before
the actual infection arrives. That may sound impressive, but constitutes a
novelistic blunder, because Camus wants it both ways and cannot make it
work either way. Either the relatively innocent suffer an affliction from
outside, or the at least somewhat culpable are compelled to suffer the out-
ward sign of their inward lack of grace. Truth doubtless lies in between, in
our lives, but to represent so mixed a truth in your novel you must be an
accomplished novelist, and not an essayist, or writer of quasi-philosophical
tales. Dostoevsky dramatized the inwound textures of transcendence and
material decay in nearly every event and every personage, while The Plague
is curiously bland whenever it confronts the necessity of dramatizing any-
thing.
I am unfair in comparing Camus to Beckett, Kafka, Dostoevsky, titan-
ic authors, and it is even more unfair to contrast The Plague with Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities, since Dickens is very nearly the Shakespeare of novel-
ists. Yet the two books are surprisingly close in vision, structure, theme,
and in the relation of language to a reality of overwhelming menace.
Camus’s Plague is a version of Dickens’s Terror, and Dr. Rieux, Rambert,
Novelists and Novels 405

Father Paneloux, Tarrou, and the volunteer sanitary workers all follow in
the path of the noble Carton, since all could proclaim: “It is a far, far bet-
ter thing that I do, than I have ever done.” One can think of the Plague as
AIDS, Revolutionary Terror, the Nazi occupation, or what one will, but
one still requires persuasive representations of persons, whether in the
aggregate or in single individuals.
“Indifference,” properly cultivated, can be a stoic virtue, even a mode
of heroism, but it is very difficult to represent. Here also Camus fails the
contest with Melville or Dostoevsky. Consider a crucial dialogue between
Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, both of them authentic heroes, by the standards of
measurement of any morality, religion, or societal culture:

“My question’s this,” said Tarrou. “Why do you yourself show


such devotion, considering you don’t believe in God? I suspect
your answer may help me to mine.”
His face still in shadow, Rieux said that he’d already answered:
that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing
the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed
in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he
believed in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no
one ever threw himself on Providence completely. Anyhow, in this
respect Rieux believed himself to be on the right road—in fight-
ing against creation as he found it.
“Ah,” Tarrou remarked. “So that’s the idea you have of your
profession?”
“More or less.” The doctor came back into the light.
Tarrou made a faint whistling noise with his lips, and the doc-
tor gazed at him.
“Yes, you’re thinking it calls for pride to feel that way. But I
assure you I’ve no more than the pride that’s needed to keep me
going. I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen
when all this ends. For the moment I know this; there are sick
people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they’ll think
things over; and so shall I. But what’s wanted now is to make them
well. I defend them as best I can, that’s all.”
“Against whom?”
Rieux turned to the window. A shadow-line on the horizon told
of the presence of the sea. He was conscious only of his exhaustion,
and at the same time was struggling against a sudden, irrational
impulse to unburden himself a little more to his companion; an
eccentric, perhaps, but who, he guessed, was one of his own kind.
406 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

“I haven’t a notion, Tarrou; I assure you I haven’t a notion.


When I entered this profession, I did it ‘abstractedly,’ so to speak;
because I had a desire for it, because it meant a career like anoth-
er, one that young men often aspire to. Perhaps, too, because it
was particularly difficult for a workman’s son, like myself. And
then I had to see people die. Do you know that there are some
who refuse to die? Have you ever heard a woman scream ‘Never!’
with her last gasp? Well, I have. And then I saw that I could never
get hardened to it. I was young then, and I was outraged by the
whole scheme of things, or so I thought. Subsequently I grew
more modest. Only, I’ve never managed to get used to seeing peo-
ple die. That’s all I know. Yet after all—”
Rieux fell silent and sat down. He felt his mouth dry.
“After all—?” Tarrou prompted softly.
“After all,” the doctor repeated, then hesitated again, fixing his
eyes on Tarrou, “it’s something that a man of your sort can under-
stand most likely, but, since the order of the world is shaped by
death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him
and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our
eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence?”
Tarrou nodded.
“Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that’s all.” Rieux’s
face darkened.
“Yes, I know that. But it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”
“No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague
must mean for you.”
“Yes. A never ending defeat”
Tarrou stared at the doctor for a moment, then turned and
tramped heavily toward the door. Rieux followed him and was
almost at his side when Tarrou, who was staring at the floor, sud-
denly said:
“Who taught you all this, Doctor?”
The reply came promptly:
“Suffering”

“Indifference” to transcendence here is a humanistic protest “in fight-


ing against creation as he found it,” a defense of the dying against death.
It is a stoicism because Rieux is no longer “outraged by the whole scheme
of things,” even though he continues to know that “the order of the world
is shaped by death.” The best aesthetic touch here is the moment when
Tarrou and Rieux come to understand one another, each finding the
Novelists and Novels 407

meaning of the Plague to be “a never ending defeat.” But this is wasted


when, at the conclusion of the passage I have quoted, Rieux utters the
banality that “suffering” has taught him his pragmatic wisdom. Repeated
rereadings will dim the passage further. “A shadow-line on the horizon
told of the presence of the sea.” Conrad would have known how to inte-
grate that into his complex Impressionism, but in Camus it constitutes
another mechanical manifestation of symbolism, reminding us that Oran
opened itself to the Plague by turning its back upon the sea.
Camus was an admirable if confused moralist and the legitimate heir
of a long tradition of rational lucidity. He did not write a Candide or even
a Zadig; I cannot recall one humorous moment anywhere in his fiction. The
Stranger and The Plague, like his other fictions, are grand period pieces,
crucial reflectors of the morale and concerns of France and the Western
world in the 1940s, both before and after the Liberation from the Nazis.
Powerful representations of an era have their own use and justification and
offer values not in themselves aesthetic.
N O V E L S
A N D

Bernard Malamud
N O V E L I S T S

(1914–1986)

The Fixer and The Tenants

MALAMUD IS PERHAPS THE PUREST STORY TELLER SINCE LESKOV. I READ ON


always to team what will come next, and usually in at least faint dread of
what may happen. The dreadful in Malamud is not what already has hap-
pened, not at least until the horrible final page of The Tenants. Perhaps the
sense of impending dread, even in the comic mode, is one of the genuine-
ly negative Jewish qualities that Malamud’s work possesses. “Every Jew is a
meteorologist” says the Israeli humorist Kishon, and certainly Malamud’s
creatures live in their sense that lightning bolts will need to be dodged.
The Jewishness of Malamud’s fiction has been a puzzle from the start,
as his better critics always indicated. Malamud’s vision is personal, original,
and almost wholly unrelated to the most characteristic or normative Jewish
thought and tradition. As for Malamud’s style, it too is a peculiar (and daz-
zling) invention. It may give off the aura of Yiddish to readers who do not
know the language, but to anyone who spoke and studied Yiddish as a child,
the accents of memory emerge from the pages of Herzog but not of The
Fixer. Malamud’s idiom, like his stance, is a beautiful and usurping achieve-
ment of the imagination. His triumph is to have given us Malamud, and
somehow then compelled us to think, as we read, how Jewish it all seems.
I can summon up no contemporary writer who suffers less from the anxi-
ety-of-influence, whose books are less concerned to answer the self-crip-
pling question: “Is there anything left to be done?” Like his own first hero,
he is a Natural.
Yet having said this, I become uneasy, for the truth here must be more
complex. When I think back over Malamud, I remember first stories like
“The Jewbird” and “The Magic Barrel,” and it seems ridiculous to call such

408
Novelists and Novels 409

stories anything but Jewish. Malamud’s most impressive novel remains The
Fixer, which is essentially a premonitory vision of a time that the Russian
Jews might all too easily enter again. Perhaps in reading Malamud as an
extravagantly vivid expressionist whose art seduces us into a redefinition of
Jewishness, we in fact are misreading him. A pure enough storyteller, in
Jewish tradition, ultimately tells not a story but the truth, and the burden
of The Fixer and The Tenants may yet prove to be the burden of the valley
of vision. It may be time to read Malamud as a modest but genuine version
of prophecy.
Critical accounts of Malamud tend to diverge widely. Thus Harold
Fisch, in his The Dual Image, a brief but packed survey on the figure of the
Jew as both noble and ignoble in English and American literature, sees the
theme of The Fixer as “the experience of victimization in general.” But to
Allen Guttmann the theme is the very different one of “the responsibilities
of peoplehood.” Robert Alter finds the probable balance: “Though to be a
Jew in this novel does involve a general moral stance, it also means being
involved in the fate of a particular people, actively identifying with its his-
tory.” The most hopeful view is that of Ruth R. Wisse, in a fine monograph
on The Schlemiel As Modern Hero, which sees Bok’s acceptance of his
imprisonment as “the crucial moment of initiation” and can even speak of
“the liberating effects of imprisonment.”
But Yakov Bok is recalcitrant to all these views, which might be
summed up best in Alter’s notion that in Malamud the fundamental
metaphor for Jewishness is imprisonment, imprisonment being “a general
image for the moral life with all its imponderable obstacles to spontaneous
self-fulfillment.” If I understand Alter, imprisonment in this wide sense
equals civilization and its discontents, and all sublimation thus becomes a
kind of incarceration. This is ingenious, but threatens a diffusion of mean-
ing that few storytellers could survive.
Malamud-on-Malamud has been more than a touch misleading, and
his critics have suffered by following him. If being Jewish were simply the
right combination of suffering and moralism, and nothing more, then all
people indeed would be Jews, when their lives were considered under
those aspects alone. The Assistant encourages such a reading, but is a very
unformed book compared to The Fixer and The Tenants. Though Yakov
Bok’s covenant is ostensibly only with himself, it is with himself as repre-
sentative of all other Jews, and so might as well be with God. And where
there is covenant, and trust in covenant, which is what sustains Bok at the
end, there is the Jewish as opposed to any Christian idea of faith. Bok is, as
all the critics have seen, a terribly ordinary man, yet his endurance
becomes extraordinary in his refusal to implicate all Jews in the “crime” of
410 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

ritual murder. Though the process of hardening his will is what makes Bok
a Jew, and only initially despite himself, I cannot agree with Alter that Bok
becomes a Jew in Malamud’s special sense, rather than in the traditional
sense. Alter may be right in discerning Malamud’s intentions, but the sto-
ryteller’s power breaks through those intentions and joins Bok to a
strength greater than his own simplicity could hope to give him. If part of
Bok’s birthright as a Jew is being vulnerable to history’s worst errors, there
is another part, a tempering of the will that turns Bok against time’s injus-
tices, and makes of this simple man a rebel against history, like so many of
his people:

As for history, Yakov thought, there are ways to reverse it. What
the Tsar deserves is a bullet in the gut. Better him than us.... Death
to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!

In context, as the end of Bok’s evolution from a solitary fixer, scarcely


Jewish, wholly without a sense of community, this has considerable force,
of a kind previously unsuspected in Malamud. With the grim strength of
The Tenants now known to us, it is possible to see retrospectively that
Malamud underwent a change in The Fixer. His private vision of
Jewishness was absorbed by a more historical understanding of a phenom-
enon too large to be affected by individual invention. Added to this, I sus-
pect, came a more historicized dread than had been operative in the earli-
er Malamud.
Coming together in The Tenants are elements from the story “Black is
My Favorite Color” and a number of themes from the Fidelman saga,
including the destroyed manuscript. Lesser, the obsessed Jewish writer,
desperate to finish his book, which is about love, is swept up into a dance
of death with the black writer Willie Spearmint. The dance takes place in
a tenement ready for demolition, from which Lesser declines to move. For
Lesser writes only by rewriting, a revisionary constantly swerving away
from himself, and he cannot bear to leave the scene of his book’s birth until
he is willing to call it complete. But an end is more than he can stand. It
will be, if ever done, his third novel, but Lesser has worked on it for nine
and a half years, and is now thirty-six and still unmarried. Lesser’s deepest
obsession is that he has never really told the truth, but in fact he is addict-
ed to truth-telling.
Spearmint, archetypal Black Writer, wishing to be “the best Soul
Writer,” but balked in creation, persuades Lesser to read his manuscript.
The rest is disaster, or as Lesser says towards the end: “Who’s hiring Willie
Spearmint to be my dybbuk?” But each becomes the other’s dybbuk.
Novelists and Novels 411

Intending only the truth of art, Lesser destroys Spearmint’s self-confi-


dence in his writing, and compounds the destruction by falling in love with
Spearmint’s Jewish girl friend, and taking her away from her black lover.
Spearmint retaliates by destroying the manuscript of Lesser’s nearly com-
plete novel. Tied to one another by a hatred transcending everything else,
the two writers stalk one another in the ruined tenement, Spearmint with
a saber, Lesser with an ax, like the hideous death-duel in the Hall of
Spiders between Swelter and Flay in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. The title
of Lesser’s destroyed novel about love was The Promised End, with the epi-
graph, also from King Lear: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The
Fool’s reply to Lear’s bitter question is: “Lear’s shadow,” and Spearmint is
Lesser’s shadow, his cabalistic Other Side. When Lear, at the close, enters
with the dead Cordelia in his arms, Kent says: “Is this the promised end?”
and Edgar adds: “Or image of that horror?” I suppose Malamud wants us
to ask the same as his novel ends:

Neither of them could see the other but sensed where he stood.
Each heard himself scarcely breathing.
“Bloodsuckin Jew Niggerhater.”
“Anti-Semitic Ape.”
Their metal glinted in hidden light.... They aimed at each other
accurate blows. Lesser felt his jagged ax sink through bone and
brain as the groaning black’s razor-sharp saber, in a single boiling
stabbing slash, cut the white’s balls from the rest of him.
Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.

Whether as parable or as prophecy, The Tenants holds together, all one


thing, a unity dependent upon Lesser’s love of the truth (which for him is
the novelist’s art) over love itself. Ultimately, Lesser loves only the Book,
and when Levenspiel, the landlord who wants him out, sarcastically asks,
“... what are you writing, the Holy Bible?” Lesser comes back with, “Who
can say? Who really knows?” In the parallel obsession of Spearmint, which
the black writer is at last unable to sustain, a troubling reflection of Lesser’s
zeal is meant to haunt us. The Tenants, like Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet,
is Jewish wisdom literature, and perhaps both books lose as fictions what
they gain as parables.
N O V E L S
A N D

Ralph Waldo Ellison


N O V E L I S T S

(1914–1994)

The Invisible Man

MORE THAN A THIRD OF A CENTURY AFTER ITS ORIGINAL PUBLICATION


(1952), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is fully confirmed as an American
Classic. I remember reading Invisible Man when it first appeared, and join-
ing in the enthusiastic reception of the book. A number of readings since
have caused the novel to seem richer, and rereading it now brings no temp-
tation to dissent from the general verdict. One can prophesy that Invisible
Man will be judged, some day, as the principal work of American fiction
between Faulkner’s major phase and Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon. Only
West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, of all the novels between Faulkner and Pynchon,
rivals Invisible Man as an eminent instance of the American imagination in
narrative, and West’s scope is specialized and narrow, however intense in its
superbly negative exuberance.
Rereading Invisible Man, the exuberance of the tale and the strength of
its nameless narrator seem to me far less negative than they did back in
1952. I agree with Douglas Robinson that Ellison gave us a Book of Jonah
in descent from Moby-Dick, and so I agree also with Robinson’s argument
against R.W.B. Lewis’s distinguished and influential contention that
Invisible Man is an apocalyptic work. Ellison’s novel is the narrator’s book,
and not the book of Rinehart or of Ras the Exhorter, and the narrator goes
underground only as Jonah does, to come up again, in order to live as a nar-
rator. Like Jonah, like the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge, like Melville’s
Ishmael, and even like Job, the narrator escapes apocalypse and returns to
tell us his story.
When we first meet the narrator, he is living an underground existence
that seems to have suggested to Pynchon the grand invention of the story

412
Novelists and Novels 413

of Byron the Light Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow (I owe this allusive link to
Pamela Schirmeister). Byron the Bulb’s war against the System which
insists that he burn out is a precisely apocalyptic transumption of the
Invisible Man’s struggle against Monopolated Light & Power:

That is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power.


The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness.
I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned
to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly
1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not
with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-
operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. I’ve
already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of
vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or
flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and
brighter light. The truth is the light and light is the truth. When
I finish all four walls, then I’ll start on the floor. Just how that will
go, I don’t know. Yet when you have lived invisible as long as I
have you develop a certain ingenuity. I’ll solve the problem. And
maybe I’ll invent a gadget to place my coffee pot on the fire while
I lie in bed, and even invent a gadget to warm my bed—like the
fellow I saw in one of the picture magazines who made himself a
gadget to warm his shoes! Though invisible, I am in the great
American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison
and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a
“thinker-tinker.” Yes, I’ll warm my shoes; they need it, they’re
usually full of holes. I’ll do that and more.

Even Pynchon must have envied those 1,369 lights, all of them old-
fashioned filaments if none of them an immortal Byron the Bulb. Ellison’s
Invisible Man is another ancestor of all those heroic schlemiels who con-
stitute Pynchon’s hopeless preterites, the Counterforce of Tyrone
Slothrop, Roger Mexico, poor Byron the Bulb, and the other Gnostic
sparks of light who flash on amidst the broken vessels of the Zone. As befits
his great namesake Emerson, Ellison is both pragmatist and transcenden-
talist, a combination that in Pynchon falls downwards and outwards into
entropy and paranoia. It is a perplexing irony that Ellison’s narrator ends
with a prophecy that Ellison himself has been unable to fulfill (Invisible
Man being his first and last novel) but that Pynchon has inherited:

Yes, but what is the next phase? How often have I tried to find it!
414 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Over and over again I’ve gone up above to seek it out. For, like
almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of
optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but
now, after first being “for” society and then “against” it, I assign
myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much
against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of
infinite possibilities. What a phrase—still it’s a good phrase and a
good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other; that much
I’ve learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting
the world in a strait-jacket, its definition is possibility. Step outside
the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into
chaos—ask Rinehart, he’s a master of it—or imagination. That too
I’ve learned in the cellar, and not by deadening my sense of per-
ception; I’m invisible, not blind.

Pynchon has stepped, of course, into both chaos and imagination, but
his chaos is the apocalyptic Zone where we may yet live again (if we live), and
his imagination is his Kabbalistic vision that he calls “sado-anarchism.” The
step beyond Invisible Man is one that Ellison is too humane and too human-
istic to have taken. Pynchon, chronicler of the Counterforce but hardly its
prophet, gives us the Invisible Man a generation later in the image of
Rocketman, the sublimely inane Slothrop, who is literally scattered into
more than invisibility in the Zone, and who may have been sighted for a final
time as a fleeting photograph on the record jacket of a rock band.

II

The antinomies between which Ellison’s narrator moves are Rinehart


(more an image than a man) and the poignant figure of Ras the Exhorter,
very much a man, indeed the most sympathetic personality in the novel,
more so even than the martyred Tod Clifton. Driven mad by white oppres-
sion and brutality, Ras becomes Ras the Destroyer, at once Ahab and
Moby-Dick, and is silenced by his own spear, slung back at him by the nar-
rator, an Ishmael turned avenger in self-defense. But Ras, though he suf-
fers Ahab’s fate, is no Ahab, and his remains an uncanny prophecy to blacks
and whites alike. Clifton speaks the truth when he observes: “But it’s on the
inside that Ras is strong. On the inside he’s dangerous.” Ras speaks the
dangerous eloquence of justified indignation and despair:

Ras struck his thighs with his fists. “Me crazy, mahn? You call me
crazy? Look at you two and look at me—is this sanity? Standing
Novelists and Novels 415

here in three shades of blackness! Three black men fighting in the


street because of the white enslaver? Is that sanity? Is that con-
sciousness, scientific understahnding? Is that the modern black
mahn of the twentieth century? Hell, mahn! Is it self-respect—
black against black? What they give you to betray—their women?
You fall for that?”
“Let’s go,” I said, listening and remembering and suddenly alive
in the dark with the horror of the battle royal, but Clifton looked
at Ras with a tight, fascinated expression, pulling away from me.
“Let’s go,” I repeated. He stood there, looking.
“Sure, you go,” Ras said, “but not him. You contahminated but
he the real black mahn. In Africa this mahn be a chief, a black
king! Here they say he rape them godahm women with no blood
in their veins. I bet this mahn can’t beat them off with baseball
bat-shit! What kind of foolishness is it? Kick him ass from cradle
to grave then call him brother? Does it make mahthematics? Is it
logic? Look at him, mahn; open your eyes,” he said to me. “I look
like that I rock the blahsted world! They know about me in Japan,
India—all the colored countries. Youth! Intelligence! The mahn’s
a natural prince! Where is your eyes? Where your self-respect?
Working for them dahm people? Their days is numbered, the
time is almost here and you fooling ‘round like this was the nine-
teenth century. I don’t understand you. Am I ignorant? Answer
me, mahn!”

If Ras is the imagination ruined by apocalyptic expansiveness, verging


upon Pynchonean paranoia, then the image of Rinehart is chaos come
again, but chaos verging upon an entropy that negates any new origin out
of which a fresh creation might come. Rinehart is visibility personified, a
moving shadow identified by and identical with what he wears: dark glass-
es, in particular, interpreted by the narrator as the Pauline “through a
glass, darkly,” and a white hat. If Ras is both Exhorter and Destroyer,
Rinehart is both numbers runner and the Reverend B.P. Rinehart, Spiritual
Technologist, who makes the Seen Unseen and tells us to Behold the
Invisible. The narrator, gazing into Rinehart’s church, experiences a true
defeat, subtler than any Ras could hope to inflict:

Then the door opened and I looked past their heads into a small
crowded room of men and women sitting in folding chairs, to the
front where a slender woman in a rusty black robe played pas-
sionate boogie-woogie on an upright piano along with a young
416 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

man wearing a skull cap who struck righteous riffs from an elec-
tric guitar which was connected to an amplifier that hung from the
ceiling above a gleaming white and gold pulpit. A man in an ele-
gant red cardinal’s robe and a high lace collar stood resting against
an enormous Bible and now began to lead a hard-driving hymn
which the congregation shouted in the unknown tongue. And
back and high on the wall above him there arched the words in
letters of gold:

LET THERE BE LIGHT!

The whole scene quivered vague and mysterious in the green


light, then the door closed and the sound muted down.
It was too much for me. I removed my glasses and tucked the
white hat carefully beneath my arm and walked away. Can it be, I
thought, can it actually be? And I knew that it was. I had heard of
it before but I’d never come so close. Still, could he be all of them:
Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and
Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be
both rind and heart? What is real anyway? But how could I doubt
it? He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart
the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility
and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must
have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was with-
out boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the
rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in
it. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be
believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

In some sense, Rinehart’s truth which was always a lie becomes the
dominant influence upon the narrator. It not only drives him under-
ground, but it confirms his obsession with illumination, his parodistic
reliance upon 1,369 lights. Rinehart is the authentic dweller in possibility,
which Emily Dickinson called a fairer house than prose, being as it is supe-
rior of windows, more numerous of doors. Harlem or black existence is
again either chaos or imagination, the possibility of Rinehart or the
increasingly furious possibility of Ras the Destroyer.
The narrator, though, is finally the only authentic American, black or
white, because he follows the American Religion, which is Emersonian
Self-Reliance. He insists upon himself, refuses to go on imitating his false
fathers, and evades both Rinehart and Ras. True, he is the Emersonian
Novelists and Novels 417

driven underground, but he will emerge more Emersonian than ever,


insisting that he has become Representative Man:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

The Invisible Man says that he is frightened by this truth, and so are
we. What is more frightening, for us and for him, is truer now than it was
a third of a century ago, and is even more Emersonian. We have learned
that, on the higher frequencies, Ellison speaks for us.
N O V E L S
A N D

Saul Bellow
N O V E L I S T S

(1915–)

Herzog

BY GENERAL CRITICAL AGREEMENT, SAUL BELLOW IS THE STRONGEST


American novelist of his generation, presumably with Norman Mailer as
his nearest rival. What makes this canonical judgment a touch problemat-
ic is that the indisputable achievement does not appear to reside in any sin-
gle book. Bellow’s principal works are: The Adventures of Augie March,
Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and in a briefer compass, Seize the Day. The earli-
er novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, seem now to be period pieces,
while Henderson the Rain King and Mr. Sammler’s Planet share the curious
quality of not being quite worthy of two figures so memorable as
Henderson and Mr. Sammler. The Dean’s December is a drab book, its drea-
riness unredeemed by Bellow’s nearly absent comic genius.
Herzog, still possessing the exuberance of Augie March, while anticipat-
ing the tragicomic sophistication of Humboldt’s Gift, as of now seems to be
Bellow’s best and most representative novel. And yet its central figure
remains a wavering representation, compared to some of the subsidiary
male characters, and its women seem the wish-fulfillments, negative as well
as positive, of Herzog and his creator. This seems true of almost all of
Bellow’s fiction: a Dickensian gusto animates a fabulous array of secondary
and minor personalities, while at the center a colorful but shadowy con-
sciousness is hedged in by women who do not persuade us, though evi-
dently once they persuaded him.
In some sense, the canonical status of Bellow is already assured, even if
the indubitable book is still to come. Bellow’s strengths may not have come

418
Novelists and Novels 419

together to form a masterwork, but he is hardly the first novelist of real


eminence whose books may be weaker as aggregates than in their compo-
nent parts or aspects. His stylistic achievement is beyond dispute, as are his
humor, his narrative inventiveness, and his astonishing inner car, whether
for monologue or dialogue. Perhaps his greatest gift is for creating sub-
sidiary and minor characters of grotesque splendor, sublime in their vivac-
ity, intensity, and capacity to surprise. They may be caricatures, yet their
vitality seems permanent: Einhorn, Clem Tembow, Bateshaw, Valentine
Gersbach, Sandor Himmelstein, Von Humboldt Fleisher, Cantabile, Alec
Szathmar. Alas, compared to them, the narrator-heroes, Augie, Herzog,
and Citrine, are diffuse beings, possibly because Bellow cannot disengage
from them, despite heroic efforts and revisions. I remember Augie March
for Einhorn, Herzog for Gersbach, Humboldt’s Gift for Humboldt, and even
that last preference tends to throw off-center an apprehension of the novel.
Augie March and Herzog narrate and speak with tang and eloquence, yet
they themselves are less memorable than what they say. Citrine, more sub-
dued in his language, fades yet more quickly into the continuum of
Bellow’s urban cosmos. This helps compound the aesthetic mystery of
Bellow’s achievement. His heroes are superb observers, worthy of their
Whitmanian heritage. What they lack is Whitman’s Real Me or Me
Myself, or else they are blocked from expressing it.

II

Few novelists have ever surpassed Bellow at openings and closings:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—


and go at things’ as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make
the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; some-
times an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a
man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there
isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical
work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of


those near-at-hand and believe you come to them in this immedi-
ate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a
flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop,
probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove
there was no America.
420 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The end and the start cunningly interlace, very much in the mode of
Song of Myself, or of the first and last chapters of Emerson’s Nature. Augie
too is an American Transcendentalist, a picaresque quester for the god
within the self. Ethos is the Daimon, both passages say, with Augie as ethos
and Columbus as the daimon. One remembers the aged Whitman’s self-
identification in his “Prayer of Columbus,” and it seems right to rejoice, as
Whitman would have rejoiced, when Augie comes full circle from going at
things, self-taught and free-style, to discovering those near-at-hand, upon
the shores of America. That is Bellow at his most exuberant. When weath-
ered, the exuberance remains, but lies in shadow:

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses


Herzog.
Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself
had doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved
oddly, he felt confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had
fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the
sun.... Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the
newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at
last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.

Perhaps he’d stop writing letters. Yes, that was what was coming, in
fact. The knowledge that he was done with these letters. Whatever
had come over him during these last months, the spell, really
seemed to be passing, really going. He set down his hat, with the
roses and day lilies, off the half-painted piano, and went into his
study, carrying the wine bottles in one hand like a pair of Indian
clubs. Walking over notes and papers, he lay down on his Récamier
couch. As he stretched out, he took a long breath, and then he lay,
looking at the mesh of the screen, pulled loose by vines, and listen-
ing to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle’s broom. He wanted to
tell her to sprinkle the floor. She was raising too much dust. In a few
minutes he would call down to her, “Damp it down, Mrs. Tuttle.
There’s water in the sink.” But not just yet. At this time he had no
messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.

Another ritorno, but this time the cycle has been broken. Augie March,
like Emerson and Whitman, knows that there is no history, only biogra-
phy. Moses Herzog has been a long time discovering this truth, which ends
his profession, and Charlie Citrine also goes full-circle:
Novelists and Novels 421

The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the


Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone
had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been
waiting eagerly, I can tell you that. An avant-garde writer, the first
of a new generation, he was handsome, fair, large, serious, witty,
he was learned. The guy had it all. All the papers reviewed his
book. His picture appeared in Time without insult and in
Newsweek with praise. I read Harlequin Ballads enthusiastically. I
was a student at the University of Wisconsin and thought about
nothing but literature day and night. Humboldt revealed to me
new ways of doing things. I was ecstatic. I envied his luck, his tal-
ent, and his fame, and I went cast in May to have a look at him—
perhaps to get next to him. The Greyhound bus, taking the
Scranton route, made the trip in about fifty hours. That didn’t
matter. The bus windows were open. I had never seen real moun-
tains before. Trees were budding. It was like Beethoven’s Pastorale.
I felt showered by the green, within ... Humboldt was very kind.
He introduced me to people in the Village and got me books to
review. I always loved him.

Within the grave was an open concrete case. The coffins went
down and then the yellow machine moved forward and the little
crane, making a throaty whir, picked up a concrete slab and laid it
atop the concrete case. So the coffin was enclosed and the soil did
not cone directly upon it. But then, how did one get out? One did-
n’t, didn’t, didn’t! You stayed, you stayed! There was a dry light
grating as of crockery when contact was made, a sort of sugarbowl
sound. Thus, the condensation of collective intelligences and
combined ingenuities, its cables silently spinning, dealt with the
individual poet....
Menasha and I went toward the limousine. The side of his foot
brushed away some of last autumn’s leaves and he said, looking
through his goggles, “What this, Charlie, a spring flower?”
“It is. I guess it’s going to happen after all. On a warm day like
this everything looks ten times deader.”
“So it’s a little flower,” Menasha said. “They used to tell one
about a kid asking his grumpy old man when they were walking in
the park, ‘What’s the name of this flower, Papa?’ and the old guy
is peevish and he yells, ‘How should I know? Am I in the millinery
business?’ Here’s another, but what do you suppose they’re called,
Charlie?”
422 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

“Search me,” I said. “I’m a city boy myself. They must be cro-
cuses.”

The cycle is from Citrine’s early: “I felt showered by the green, with-
in” to his late, toneless, “They must be crocuses,” removed from all affect
not because he has stopped loving Humboldt, but because he is chilled
preternaturally by the effective if unfair trope Bellow has found for the
workings of canonical criticism: “Thus, the condensation of collective
intelligences and combined ingenuities, its cables silently spinning, dealt
with the individual poet.” There is no history, and now there is also no
biography, but only the terrible dehumanizing machine of a technocratic
intelligentsia, destroying individuality and poetry, and stealing from the
spring of the year the green that no longer is to be internalized.

III

Bellow’s endless war against each fresh wave of literary and intellectu-
al modernism is both an aesthetic resource and all aesthetic liability in his
fiction. As resource, it becomes a drive for an older freedom, all energy of
humane protest against over-determination. As liability, it threatens to
become repetition, or a merely personal bitterness, even blending into
Bellow’s acerbic judgments upon the psychology of women. When it is
most adroitly balanced, in Herzog, the polemic against modernism
embraces the subtle infiltrations of dubious ideologies into the protesting
Moses Herzog himself. When it is least balanced, we receive the narrative
rant that intrudes into Mr. Sammler’s cosmos, or the dankness that per-
vades both Chicago and Bucharest in The Dean’s December. Like Ruskin
lamenting that the water in Lake Como was no longer blue, Bellow’s
Alexander Corde tells us that “Chicago wasn’t Chicago anymore.” What
The Dean’s December truly tells us is that “Bellow wasn’t Bellow anymore,”
in this book anyway. The creator of Einhorn and Gersbach and Von
Humboldt Fleisher gives us no such figure this time around, almost as
though momentarily he resents his own genius for the high comedy of the
grotesque.
Yet Bellow’s lifelong polemic against the aestheticism of Flaubert and
his followers is itself the exuberant myth that made Augie March, Herzog,
and Humboldt’s Gift possible. In an act of critical shrewdness, Bellow once
associated his mode of anti-modernist comedy with Svevo’s Confessions of
Zeno and Nabokov’s Lolita, two masterpieces of ironic parody that actually
surpass Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King in portraying the modernist con-
sciousness as stand-up comic. Parody tends to negate outrage, and Bellow
Novelists and Novels 423

is too vigorous to be comfortable at masking his own outrage. When


restrained, Bellow is too visibly restrained, unlike the mordant Svevo or
the Nabokov who excels at deadpan mockery. Henderson may be more of
a self-portrait, but Herzog, scholar of High Romanticism, better conveys
Bellow’s vitalistic version of an anti-modernistic comic stance. Bellow is
closest to Svevo and to Nabokov in the grand parody of Herzog-Hamlet
declining to shoot Gersbach-Claudius when he finds the outrageous adul-
terer scouring the bathtub after bathing Herzog’s little daughter. Daniel
Fuchs, certainly Bellow’s most careful and informed scholar, reads this
scene rather too idealistically by evading the parodic implications of
“Moses might have killed him now.” Bathing a child is our sentimental ver-
sion of prayer, and poor Herzog, unlike Hamlet, is a sentimentalist, rather
than a triumphant rejecter of nihilism, as Fuchs insists.
Bellow, though carefully distanced from Herzog, is himself something
of a sentimentalist, which in itself need not be an aesthetic disability for a
novelist. Witness Samuel Richardson and Dickens, but their sentimental-
ism is so titanic as to become something different in kind, a sensibility of
excess larger than even Bellow can hope to display. In seeking to oppose an
earlier Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman) to the belated
Romanticism of literary modernism (Gide, Eliot, Hemingway), Bellow had
the peculiar difficulty of needing to avoid the heroic vitalism that he
regards as an involuntary parody of High Romanticism (Rimbaud, D. H.
Lawrence, and, in a lesser register, Norman Mailer). Henderson, Bellow’s
Gentile surrogate, is representative of just how that difficulty constricts
Bellow’s imagination. The Blakean dialectic of Innocence and Experience,
clearly overt in the scheme of the novel, is at odds with Henderson’s char-
acteristically Bellovian need for punishment or unconscious sense of guilt,
which prevails in spite of Bellow’s attempts to evade Freudian overdeter-
mination. Though he wants and indeed needs a psychology of the will,
Bellow is much more Freudian than he can bear to know. Henderson is a
superbly regressive personality, very much at one with the orphan child he
holds at the end of the novel. Dahfu, of whom Norman Mailer strongly
approved, is about as persuasive a representation as are his opposites in
Bellow, all of those sadistic and compelling fatal ladies, pipe dreams of a
male vision of otherness as a castrating force. Bellow disdains apocalypse
as a mode, but perhaps the Bellovian apocalypse would be one in which all
of the darkly attractive women of these novels converged upon poor
Dahfu, Blakean vitalist, and divested him of the emblem of his therapeutic
vitalism.
Without his polemic, Bellow never seems able to get started, even in
Humboldt’s Gift, where the comedy is purest. Unfortunately, Bellow cannot
424 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

match the modernist masters of the novel. In American fiction, his chrono-
logical location between, say, Faulkner and Pynchon exposes him to com-
parisons he does not seek yet also cannot sustain. Literary polemic within
a novel is dangerous because it directs the critical reader into the areas
where canonical judgments must be made, as part of the legitimate activi-
ty of reading. Bellow’s polemic is normative, almost Judaic in its moral
emphases, its passions for justice and for more life. The polemic some-
times becomes more attractive than its aesthetic embodiments. Would we
be so charmed by Herzog if he did not speak for so many of us? I become
wary when someone tells me that she or he “loves” Gravity’s Rainbow. The
grand Pynchonian doctrine of sado-anarchism scarcely should evoke affec-
tion in anyone, as opposed to the shudder of recognition that the book’s
extraordinary aesthetic dignity demands from us. It is the aesthetic failure
of Bellow’s polemic, oddly combined with its moral success, that increas-
ingly drives Bellow’s central figures into dubious mysticisms. Citrine’s
devotion to Rudolf Steiner is rather less impressive, intellectually and aes-
thetically, than the obsessive Kabbalism of Gravity’s Rainbow. If Steiner is
the ultimate answer to literary modernism, then Flaubert may rest easy in
his tomb.

IV

And yet Bellow remains a humane comic novelist of superb gifts,


almost unique in American fiction since Mark Twain. I give the last words
here to what moves me as the most beautiful sequence in Bellow, Herzog’s
final week of letters, starting with his triumphant overcoming of his obses-
sion with Madeleine and Gersbach. On his betraying wife, Herzog is con-
tent to end with a celebration now at last beyond masochism: “To put on
lipstick, after dinner in a restaurant, she would look at her reflection in a
knife blade. He recalled this with delight.” On Gersbach, with his indu-
bitable, latently homosexual need to cuckold his best friend, Herzog is just
and definitive: “Enjoy her—rejoice in her. You will not reach me through her,
however, I know you sought me in her flesh. But I am no longer there.” The
unmailed messages go on, generously assuring Nietzsche of Herzog’s
admiration while telling the philosopher: “Your immoralists also eat meat.
They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers.” The sequence
magnificently includes an epistle to Dr. Morgenfruh, doubtless a Yiddish
version of the Nietzschean Dawn of Day, of whom Herzog wisely remarks:
“He was a splendid old man, only partly fraudulent, and what more can
you ask of anyone?” Addressing Dr. Morgenfruh, Herzog speculates dark-
ly “that the territorial instinct is stronger than the sexual.” But then, with
Novelists and Novels 425

exquisite grace, Herzog signs off. “Abide in light, Morgenfruh. I will keep you
posted from time to time.” This benign farewell is made not by an overde-
termined bundle of territorial and sexual instincts, but by a persuasive rep-
resentative of the oldest ongoing Western tradition of moral wisdom and
familial compassion.
N O V E L S
A N D

Walker Percy
N O V E L I S T S

(1916–1990)

The Moviegoer

WITH MANY OTHER READERS, I DISCOVERED THE MOVIEGOER IN 1961, AND


was delighted. Rereading it a quarter-century later, the delight returns, but
perhaps somewhat darkened by intimations in the novel of the moral and
religious obsessions that have made each subsequent fiction by Walker
Percy rather more problematic than the one before. As a storyteller, Percy
chooses to follow the downward path to wisdom, perhaps at the expense of
his stories. The Last Gentleman (1966) had not abandoned all the narrative
concerns of The Moviegoer, but Love in the Ruins (1971) resorts to apoca-
lyptic yearnings, and Lancelot (1977) seems to address a saving remnant. The
Second Coming (1980) is a wholly tendentious narrative and hardly seems to
be by the author of The Moviegoer. Acclaimed as a Southern prophet, Percy
may have become precisely that. There is a curious progression in his nov-
els’ closing passages that is revelatory of a metamorphosis from the lan-
guage of story to the urgencies that transcend art:

I watch her walk toward St. Charles, cape jasmine held against her
cheek, until my brothers and sisters call out behind me.
(The Moviegoer)

“Wait,” he shouted in a dead run. The Edsel paused, sighed, and


stopped. Strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with
great joyous ten-foot antelope bounds. The Edsel waited for him.
(The Last Gentleman)

426
Novelists and Novels 427

To bed we go for a long winter’s nap, twined about each other as


the ivy twineth not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any
such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom,
but at home in bed where all good folk belong.
(Love in the Ruins)

Do you know her well?


Yes.
Will she join me in Virginia and will she and I and Siobhan
begin a new life there?
Yes.
Very well. I’ve finished. Is there anything you wish to tell me
before Heave?
Yes.
(Lancelot)

His heart leapt with a secret joy. What is it I want from her and
him, he wondered, not only want but must have? Is she a gift and
therefore a sign of a giver? Could it be that the Lord is here, mas-
querading behind this simple silly holy face? Am I crazy to want
both, her and Him? No, not want, must have. And will have.
(The Second Coming)

Even out of context, Percy’s conclusions move him and his readers
from a narrative poignance to a theocentric anxiety. It cannot be gratuitous
that both Lancelot and The Second Coming end with the hero conversing
with a kindly priest. “The past peculiar years of Christendom” craze
Percy’s protagonists, and by implication Percy thinks the worse of us for
not being so crazed. Despite the manifest humor of his Lost in the Cosmos:
The Last Self-Help Book (1983), Percy intends its conclusion as what can
only be called a low seriousness:

Repeat. Do you read? Do you read? Are you in trouble? How did
you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought help? If
you did, did help come? If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of
trouble? What is the character of your consciousness? Are you
conscious? Do you have a self ? Do you know who you are? Do
you know what you are doing? Do you love? Do you know how to
love? Are you loved? Do you hate? Do you read me? Come back.
Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.
(CHECK ONE)
428 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

II

A rereading of The Moviegoer after a first reading of Lancelot and The


Second Coming must confront a critic with a bemused sense of loss. Binx
Bolling is more than the most amiable of Percy’s surrogates; his freedom
from the drive to moralize has about it now the aura of his author’s lost
freedom. Aunt Emily, the book’s moralizer, is a presage of many a Percyan
denunciation to come, and yet her highly individual style allows us to
absorb her condemnations as we cannot quite sustain the scoldings that
come in Percy’s later novels:

Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remem-


bered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos.
Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined medioc-
rity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us
to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no
blood running in the street, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we’re
sentimental people and we horrify easily. True, our moral fiber is rot-
ten. Our national character stinks to high heaven. But we are kinder
than ever. No prostitute ever responded with a quicker spasm of sen-
timent when our hearts are touched. Nor is there anything new
about thievery, lewdness, lying, adultery. What is new is that in our
time liars and thieves and whores and adulterers wish also to be con-
gratulated and are congratulated by the great public, if their confes-
sion is sufficiently psychological or strikes a sufficiently heartfelt and
authentic note of sincerity.

However much we admire the formidable Aunt Emily and rightly find
this rhetoric to be suitable to her, none among us could regard this as what
is best or most enduring in The Moviegoer. Binx is just that; he is a kind of
grown-up, ruefully respectable New Orleans version of Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn. Like Huck, Binx longs for freedom while fearing soli-
tude. But an Existentialist Huck Finn is a sublime joke, and this joke still
seems to me Percy’s authentic and very considerable achievement. The
Moviegoer alone of Percy’s fictions, to date, is a permanent American book.
If that judgment is right, then the waste of Percy’s authentic talents is a
lamentable instance of art yielding to moralism, of storytelling subverted
by religious nostalgias.
I remember how much I initially liked The Moviegoer’s first paragraph,
and am very fond of it still:
Novelists and Novels 429

This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for


lunch. I know what this means. Since I go there every Sunday for
dinner and today is Wednesday, it can mean only one thing: she
wants to have one of her serious talks. It will be extremely grave,
either a piece of bad news about her stepdaughter Kate or else a
serious talk about me, about the future and what I ought to do. It
is enough to scare the wits out of anyone, yet I confess I do not
find the prospect altogether unpleasant.

The whole of the book is subtly present in this beginning, since Kate’s
suicidal despairs are the dark center of the moviegoer’s life as a man, to
borrow Philip Roth’s foreboding phrase. Present also is the antithetical
strain in Binx Bolling, who finds reality in his aunt’s moral stance, without
however being able to erase the distance that divides him from it, and from
every other conceivable position. Yet Binx, as he reveals to us very early, is
nothing but a quester, who seeks what everyone else asserts they have
found:

What do you seek—God? you ask with a smile.


I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the
matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount
to setting myself a goal which everyone else has reached—and
therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest
interest. Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and
eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls
report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining
2% are atheists and agnostics—which leaves not a single percent-
age point for a seeker. For myself, I enjoy answering polls as much
as anyone and take pleasure in giving intelligent replies to all
questions.
Truthfully, it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance which
constrains me from mentioning the object of my search. For, to
begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic
of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my
fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say:
Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so
sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has
occurred to them?
On my honor, I do not know the answer.

Binx clearly would not have written Lancelot, The Second Coming, and
430 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Lost in the Cosmos, but then neither would Kate, nor even Aunt Emily,
whose realistic sense of cultural and societal crisis eschews violence, even
rhetorical violence, as a response. When she impressively observes that “it
should be quite a sight, the going under of the evening land,” Binx thinks,
“For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes
sense.” That may be the difference between Aunt Emily and the later
Percy; if for you even the dissolving makes sense, then your response will
be wholly coherent, and you will be saved from responding to violence
with violence.
Binx, as the moviegoer, has become a quietist, who neither judges nor
can be judged. His bond with Kate is that both seek “certification” in his
special sense:

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood.


“Yes, it is certified now.”
She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called
certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a
neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely
he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will
expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a
movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible
for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere
and not Anywhere.

This, in a touchingly minimal way, is somehow to be provisionally


redeemed by representation, which no longer augments the self, as it did
for Walt Whitman, but at least keeps one’s context from becoming totally
emptied out. Binx and Kate win our affection, as no one subsequently in
Percy can. Doubtless, Percy did not care to give us such charming protag-
onists in his later novels, precisely because they subvert his prophetic con-
cerns. Still, it seems not wrong to hope that the novelist might yet return
to his gentler and more qualified visions.

III

Walker Percy is scarcely alone in attempting to employ the novel as


a spiritual weapon against the malaise of the age. He is not even unique in
combining an apocalyptic temperament with Roman Catholicism, though
Lancelot does not match Flannery O’Connor in that odd blend. Yet he does
have a singular predilection for moral theology, and at times achieves a
curious authority in his uncanny mode. With a stance very different from
Novelists and Novels 431

that of Protestant Fundamentalists, he regards the Jews as the eternal evi-


dence for the reality of Yahweh, and the historical authenticity of the
Roman Catholic Church. Like most of the Jewish people, I am normally
rather wary of such a search for evidences, but Percy handles it with tact
and humane wit, benign if a little unnerving. In The Moviegoer, Binx iden-
tifies his own, internal exile with that of the Jews:

An odd thing. Ever since Wednesday I have become acutely aware


of Jews. There is a clue here, but of what I cannot say. How do I
know? Because whenever I approach a Jew, the Geiger counter in
my head starts rattling away like a machine gun; and as I go past
with the utmost circumspection and with every sense alert—the
Geiger counter subsides.
There is nothing new in my Jewish vibrations. During the years
when I had friends my Aunt Edna, who is a theosophist, noticed
that all my friends were Jews. She knew why moreover: I had been
a Jew in a previous incarnation. Perhaps that is it. Anyhow it is
true that I am Jewish by instinct. We share the same exile. The
fact is, however, I am more Jewish than the Jews I know. They are
more at home than I am. I accept my exile.
Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist
reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviego-
ers are Jews.
Jews are my first real clue.
When a man is in despair and does not in his heart of hearts
allow that a search is possible and when such a man passes a Jew
in the street, he notices nothing.
When a man becomes a scientist or an artist, he is open to a dif-
ferent kind of despair. When such a man passes a Jew in the street,
he may notice something but it is not a remarkable encounter. To
him the Jew can only appear as a scientist or artist like himself or
as a specimen to be studied.
But when a man awakes to the possibility of a search and when
such a man passes a Jew in the street for the first time, he is like
Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach.

The wit of assimilating the Jewish Sabbath, which begins at sundown


on Friday, to the trace of Defoe’s Friday, conceals the moral intensity of the
passage. Miraculously surviving, the Jews are the searcher’s prime mark or
sign of the promise of God that cannot be voided. The culmination of this
sign in Percy is Will Barrett’s humorous but obsessive concern with the
432 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

supposed absence or flight of Jews from North Carolina in The Second


Coming. Barrett’s equivocal madness keeps returning him to the Jews as a
sign, particularly in an extraordinary letter that he writes:

To be specific: I wish you to monitor the demographic move-


ment of Jews not only from North Carolina but from other states
and other countries as well, to take note of any extraordinary
changes which go contrary to established demographic patterns—
such as the emigration of blacks from the South (and their present
return). If, for example, there has occurred or should occur a mas-
sive exodus of Jews from the U.S. to Israel, I request that you
establish an observation post in the village of Megiddo in the nar-
row waist of Israel (the site, as you may know, of ancient
Armageddon), where a foe from the east would logically attempt
to cut Israel in two. From this point you can monitor any unusu-
al events in the Arab countries to the east, particularly the emer-
gence of a leader of extraordinary abilities—another putative sign
of the last days.

The saving difference between this madness, and the somber stuff I
hear from television evangelists every night, is that Barrett is only mad
north-northwest, and Percy’s apocalyptic wind is blowing at us from the
south. Still in midcareer, the author of The Moviegoer may yet cease search-
ing for signs, and instead return to his gift for ruefully comic narrative. As
a critic, I want to approach Walker Percy while waving a banner before me:
“Bring back Binx Bolling!”
N O V E L I S T S
Carson McCullers

A N D
(1917–1967)

N O V E L S
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café

“I BECOME THE CHARACTERS I WRITE ABOUT AND I BLESS THE LATIN POET
Terence who said ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ ” That was the aesthet-
ic credo of Carson McCullers, and was her program for a limited yet aston-
ishingly intense art of fiction. Rereading her after nearly twenty years away
from her novels and stories, I discover that time has enhanced The Heart Is
a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café, and perhaps rendered less
problematic Reflections in a Golden Eye. What time cannot do is alter the
burden for critics that McCullers represents. Her fiction, like her person,
risked that perpetual crisis of Eros of which D.H. Lawrence was the poet
and Freud the theoretician. Call it the tendency to make false connections,
as set forth by Freud with mordant accuracy in the second paragraph of his
crucial paper of 1912, “The Dynamics of the Transference”:

Let us bear clearly in mind that every human being has acquired,
by the combined operation of inherent disposition and of external
influences in childhood, a special individuality in the exercise of his
capacity to love—that is, in the conditions which he sets up for
loving, in the impulses he gratifies by it, and in the aims he sets out
to achieve in it. This forms a cliché or stereotype in him, so to speak
(or even several), which perpetually repeats and reproduces itself
as life goes on, in so far as external circumstances and the nature
of the accessible love-objects permit, and is indeed itself to some
extent modifiable by later impressions. Now our experience has

433
434 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

shown that of these feelings which determine the capacity to love


only a part has undergone full psychical development; this part is
directed towards reality, and can be made use of by the conscious
personality, of which it forms part. The other part of these libidi-
nal impulses has been held up in development, withheld from the
conscious personality and from reality, and may either expend
itself only in phantasy, or may remain completely buried in the
unconscious so that the conscious personality is unaware of its
existence. Expectant libidinal impulses will inevitably be roused,
in anyone whose need for love is not being satisfactorily gratified
in reality, by each new person coming upon the scene, and it is
more than probable that both parts of the libido, the conscious
and the unconscious, will participate in this attitude.

All of McCullers’s characters share a particular quirk in the exercise of


their capacity to love—they exist, and eventually expire, by falling in love
with a hopeless hope. Their authentic literary ancestor is Wordsworth’s
poignant Margaret, in The Ruined Cottage, and like his Margaret they are
destroyed, not by despair, but by the extravagance of erotic hope. It is no
accident that McCullers’s first and best book should bear, as title, her most
impressive, indeed unforgettable metaphor: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
McCullers’s few ventures into literary criticism, whether of Gogol,
Faulkner, or herself, were not very illuminating, except in their obsession
with loneliness. Her notes on writing, “The Flowering Dream,” record her
violent, physical response to reading Anne Frank’s diary, which caused a
rash to break out on her hands and feet. The fear of insulation clearly was
the enabling power of McCullers’s imagination. When she cited Faulkner
and Eugene O’Neill as her major influences, she surprisingly added the
Flaubert of Madame Bovary, where we might have expected the Lawrence
of The Rainbow and “The Prussian Officer.” But it was Emma’s situation
rather than Flaubert’s stance or style that engrossed her.
Mick Kelly, McCullers’s surrogate in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
remains her absolute achievement at representing a personality, presum-
ably a vision of her own personality at the age of twelve. Vivid as the other
lonely hunters are—the deaf mute John Singer; Biff Brannon, the café pro-
prietor; Jake Blount, alcoholic revolutionary; Dr. Benedict Mady
Copeland, black liberal and reformer—the book still lives in the torment-
ed intensity of Mick Kelly, who knows early to be “grieved to think how
power and will / In opposition rule our mortal day, / And why God made
irreconcilable / Good and the means of Good.” That is the dark wisdom
of Shelley in The Triumph of Life, but it is also a wisdom realized perfectly
Novelists and Novels 435

and independently by Mick Kelly, who rightly fears the triumph of life
over her own integrity, her own hope, her own sense of potential for
achievement or for love. The Shelleyan passage becomes pure McCullers
if we transpose it to: “And why God made irreconcilable / Love and the
means of Love.”

II

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would not maintain its force if its only
final vision were to be the triumph of life, in Shelley’s ironic sense.
McCullers gives us a tough-grained, last sense of Mick Kelly, bereaved,
thrown back into an absolute loneliness, but ongoing nevertheless:

But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was
like she was shut out from the inside room. Sometimes a quick lit-
tle tune would come and go—but she never went into the inside
room with music like she used to do. It was like she was too tense.
Or maybe because it was like the store took all her energy and time.
Woolworth’s wasn’t the same as school. When she used to come
home from school she felt good and was ready to start working on
the music. But now she was always tired. At home she just ate sup-
per and slept and then ate breakfast and went off to the store again.
A song she had started in her private notebook two months before
was still not finished. And she wanted to stay in the inside room but
she didn’t know how. It was like the inside room was locked some-
where away from her. A very hard thing to understand.
Mick pushed her broken front tooth with her thumb. But she
did have Mister Singer’s radio. All the installments hadn’t been
paid and she took on the responsibility. It was good to have some-
thing that had belonged to him. And maybe one of these days she
might be able to set aside a little for a second-hand piano. Say two
bucks a week. And she wouldn’t let anybody touch this private
piano but her—only she might teach George little pieces. She
would keep it in the back room and play on it every night. And all
day Sunday. But then suppose some week she couldn’t make a pay-
ment. So then would they come to take it away like the little red
bicycle? And suppose like she wouldn’t let them. Suppose she hid
the piano under the house. Or else she would meet them at the
front door. And fight. She would knock down both the two men
so they would have shiners and broke noses and would be passed
out on the hall floor.
436 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Mick frowned and rubbed her fist hard across her forehead.
That was the way things were. It was like she was mad all the time.
Not how a kid gets mad quick so that soon it is all over—but in
another way. Only there was nothing to be mad at. Unless the
store. But the store hadn’t asked her to take the job. So there was
nothing to be mad at. It was like she was cheated. Only nobody
had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However,
just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.
But maybe it would be true about the piano and turn out O.K.
Maybe she would get a chance soon. Else what the hell good had
it all been—the way she felt about music and the plans she had
made in the inside room? It had to be some good if anything made
sense. And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too.
It was some good.
All right!
O.K.!
Some good.

One can call this “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl,” and see Mick
as a visionary of “the way things were.” She has the strength of McCullers’s
endings that are not wholly negations:

Biff wet his handkerchief beneath the water tap and patted his
drawn, tense face. Somehow he remembered that the awning had
not yet been raised. As he went to the door his walk gained steadi-
ness. And when at last he was inside again he composed himself
soberly to await the morning sun.
(The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

Even in death the body of the soldier still had the look of warm,
animal comfort. His grave face was unchanged, and his sun-
browned hands lay palm upwards on the carpet as though in sleep.
(Reflections in a Golden Eye)

The most remarkable of these conclusions is the vignette called “The


Twelve Mortal Men” that serves as epilogue or coda to The Ballad of the Sad Café:

THE TWELVE MORTAL MEN

The Forks Falls highway is three miles from the town, and it is
here the chain gang has been working. The road is of macadam,
Novelists and Novels 437

and the county decided to patch up the rough places and widen it
at a certain dangerous place. The gang is made up of twelve men,
all wearing black and white striped prison suits, and chained at the
ankles. There is a guard, with a gun, his eyes drawn to red slits by
the glare. The gang works all the day long, arriving huddled in the
prison cart soon after daybreak, and being driven off again in the
gray August twilight. All day there is the sound of the picks strik-
ing into the clay earth, hard sunlight, the smell of sweat. And
every day there is music. One dark voice will start a phrase, half-
sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will
join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark
in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber
and joyful. The music will swell until at last it seems that the
sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from
the earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the heart to
broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.
Then slowly the music will sink down until at last there remains
one lonely voice, then a great hoarse breath, the sun, the sound of
the picks in the silence.
And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just
twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white
boys from this county. Just twelve mortal men who are together.

The rhetorical stance or tone of this is wholly McCullers’s, and is


rather difficult to characterize. In context, its reverberation is extraordi-
nary, working as it does against our incapacity to judge or even compre-
hend the grotesque tragedy of the doomed love between Miss Amelia
Evans and Cousin Lymon, with its consequence in the curious flowering
and subsequent demise of the sad café. We, as readers, also would rather
love than be loved, a preference that, in the aesthetic register, becomes the
defense of reading more intensely lest we ourselves be read, whether by
ourselves or by others. The emotion released by the juxtaposition between
the music and its origin in the chain gang is precisely akin to the affect aris-
ing from McCullers’s vision of the tragic dignity of the death of love aris-
ing so incongruously from the story of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and
the hideous Marvin Macy.
N O V E L S
A N D

Anthony Burgess
N O V E L I S T S

(1917–1993)

The Enderby Cycle and Nothing Like the Sun

ANTHONY BURGESS HAS THE SAME RELATIONSHIP TO JAMES JOYCE THAT


Samuel Beckett has; dangerous as this comparison is (and Burgess has too
much sense to welcome it), we can utilize it to define the nature and limits
of Burgess’s considerable achievement as a novelist and man-of-letters.
Though Burgess has no Murphy (Beckett’s genial, early comic masterpiece)
he has the marvelous Enderby saga (Inside Mr. Enderby; Enderby Outside; The
Clockwork Testament; or, Enderby’s End; Enderby’s Dark Lady; or, No End to
Enderby) and the even grander Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s
Love-life. Whether writing about Enderby (a vision of Burgess himself as
uncompromising poet) or Shakespeare, Burgess truly writes about Joyce’s
Poldy Bloom, and so about Joyce himself.
Murphy is as much an interpretation of Ulysses as the Enderby cycle
or Nothing Like the Sun is, but Murphy already manifests a revisionary
swerve away from the master, “a clinamen to the ideal,” as Coleridge once
called it. Beckett revised Joyce more cunningly still in Watt and the great
trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and that sly mispri-
sion of the only twentieth-century novelist to rival Proust is the founda-
tion of Beckett’s eminence as the strongest living writer in English or
French today. Burgess has a more limited ambition, and enters into no
agon with Joyce, however loving. Towards Joyce, he is the thankful
receiver or good son, a humanly heartening stance but perhaps also one
that balks the full freedom of creation.
Reviewing a biography of Beckett, Burgess shrewdly caught the subtle

438
Novelists and Novels 439

relationship between Joyce and Beckett, strong father and strong, so nec-
essarily cast-out, son:

Beckett’s books and plays posit a Cartesian division between mind


and body. (His fast published work, the poem Whoroscope, is a kind
of gorblimied life of Descartes.) Those heroes and heroines on their
last, or nonexistent, legs, assert a powerful identity in spite of the
wreck of the flesh. It is the kind of work one might expect from a
lifelong invalid. His biography shows that Beckett was always an
athlete, a well-coordinated car driver and motorbike rider who
could smash the machine but emerge whole, an excellent swimmer
and fine cricketer—the only Nobel Prizeman to be mentioned in
Wisden. His body has always been spare and tough, able to take any
amount of punishment from drink and cigarettes. But one notes a
kind of self-flagellancy. A worshipper of Joyce, he took to pretend-
ing he had Joyce’s feet, which were small and dainty and pleased
their owner: he crippled himself with unsuitable shoes. But the
body’s main pains, and its Oblomov lethargy, seem to have most to
do with Beckett’s complicated relationship with his mother....
It is somewhat eery to find that the ancient faible of Lucia Joyce
continued, long after her father’s death and the end of Ellmann’s
record. Time stopped for her, and Beckett remained the young
hawklike man who shared the masters silences and, after his rejec-
tion of the demented girl’s advances, was icily told not to call
again. Beckett’s devotion to Joyce continues, and his own artistic
perfectionism, in the study and theatre alike, is its best expression.
He works himself and his actors to the limit. The account of Billie
Whitelaw’s creative ordeal with him is one of the most remarkable
chapters of this book.

The Muse his mother reclaims Beckett from Joyce here in the first
paragraph, moving us from the cheerful, curious, active Poldy to the sub-
limely lethargic Murphy, and all the nearly inanimate Beckett protagonists
who came after him. Icily rejected after refusing Lucia’s schizophrenic
advances, Beckett is seen by Burgess as carrying the father’s aesthetic per-
fectionism to new limits. This is legitimate enough, but chooses to evade
the dwindling of Joyce’s idiom in Beckett, from its palpable presence in
Murphy to its total absence in the later, astonishingly laconic narratives, if
narratives they be.
Contrast Burgess on his “favorite novel,” Ulysses:
440 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

And yet it is not quite a novel. I have lived long enough with
Ulysses to be fully aware of its faults, and its major fault is that it
evades the excruciating problem that most novelists set them-
selves: how, without blatant contrivance, to show character in the
process of change, so that the reader, saying goodbye to Mr X or
Miss Y, realizes that these are not quite the people he met at the
beginning. There is, in every non-Joycean novel, a psychological
watershed hardly discernible to the reader; without the imposition
of a journey to this watershed fictional character can hardly be
said to exist. In Ulysses, whose action covers less than twenty-four
hours, there is no time for change. Indeed, nothing happens of
sufficient gravity to induce change. The ordinary man Bloom
meets the extraordinary youth Stephen and then says a goodnight
which is probably a goodbye. Molly Bloom dreams of Stephen as
a kind of messianic son-lover. Whatever happens in the novel, it
does not happen today. It ends on the brink of tomorrow, when
something may possibly happen, but tomorrow never comes.
That is the novel’s major fault.
It is a fault so massive that it can only be compensated for by
exceptional virtues, and these virtues I have already hinted at—the
epic vitality of the scheme, the candour of the presentation of
human life as it really is, the awe-inspiring virtuosity of the lan-
guage. Add to these the comprehensiveness of the urban vision it
provides. When we visit Dublin we carry that vision with us; it is
more real than the flesh-and-blood or stone-and-mortar reality.
We cannot, I suppose, finally judge Ulysses as a work of fiction at
all. It is a kind of magical codex, of the carne order as Dante’s
Divine Comedy (in which hell, heaven and purgatory go on forev-
er and nothing changes). But, in the practical terms in which writ-
ers are forced to think, it is a terrible literary challenge. To call it
my favourite novel is, I see, shame-fully inept. It is the work I have
to measure myself hopelessly against each time I sit down to write
fiction.

Has Burgess found, in the manner of the strong novelist, the fault that
is not there in his precursor’s masterwork? I suspect that he is asking Joyce
to be Shakespeare, whose greatest originality came in representing how his
characters changed through the process of listening to what they them-
selves had said. Burgess’s Shakespeare is overtly Joyce’s Shakespeare, so
that Nothing Like the Sun is not less overtly Joycean than is the Enderby
cycle. Joyce’s own originality, even as a parodist, is rightly celebrated as
Novelists and Novels 441

being extraordinary. Even as Proust was found by his true precursor in the
not-very-novelistic Ruskin (who nevertheless fused with Flaubert in the
influence process), so Joyce owed less to Flaubert than he did to
Shakespeare. Ulysses is not so much an interpretation of Homer, or even of
Dante, as it is of Hamlet.
Joyce’s Hamlet is an act of strong misreading, in which the poetic
father, Shakespeare, is diminished so that the vital son, Joyce, can mature.
This creation by interpretation, marked by zest, verve, saturnine wit, must
be the most striking account of Hamlet ever given to us. Shakespeare is not
Hamlet, but the ghost of Hamlet’s father, a role that he actually played on
stage (doubling as the Player King), according to tradition. Hamlet is
Stephen, or the portrait of the artist as a young man. Poor Shakespeare has
been cuckolded not just by one brother, as Hamlet senior was by Claudius,
but by two, both of whom have had their way with Anne Hathaway. If this
were not sexual defeat enough, Shakespeare in addition has lost the dark
lady of the sonnets, presumably to an honorary third brother, or best
friend. Stephen’s theory proposes that Shakespeare’s dead son, Hamnet,
enters the play as Hamlet, to recover his fathers honor through an act of
revenge. This resurrected son of Shakespeare does not lust after Anne
Hathaway, or Gertrude, and can be regarded as a proleptic representation
of Anthony Burgess, who did not refuse the gift.
In the Circe episode of Ulysses, Poldy and Stephen, each a representa-
tive of Shakespeare/Joyce, stare into a mirror and confront a transmogri-
fied Shakespeare, beardless and “rigid in facial paralysis.” Joyce is a beard-
less Shakespeare, lacking the Bard’s virility, and frozen-faced where the
precursor is mobile and expressive. Again, Burgess took the hint, even if he
did not quite join in Joyce’s ironic self-judgment. Stephen cites the
Sabellian heresy, which holds that the Father was Himself His Own Son, a
view that makes Shakespeare into Joyce, and Joyce into Burgess. Burgess,
a good Freudian (Joyce evaded Freud, properly), believes rather that the
Son was Himself His Own Father, a faith that makes Joyce into
Shakespeare, and Burgess, rather wistfully, almost into Joyce.

II

Burgess, by need and conviction, exuberantly exemplifies the


Johnsonian apothegm that only a blockhead would write for anything
except money. The consequence is an immense output, not much of which
bears rereading. His most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), owes
its notoriety more to Stanley Kubrick’s film version than to its own text,
and his overtly religious narratives (the book-length poem Moses and such
442 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

excursions as Man of Nazareth) are interesting primarily as instances of the


writer’s Manichean dualism, which has replaced Burgess’s lapsed
Catholicism. But two of the novels I reread annually: Inside Mr. Enderby
(1963) and Nothing Like the Sun (1964). Enderby triumphantly returned in
Enderby Outside (1968), only to be killed off by his ungrateful creator in The
Clockwork Testament; or, Enderby’s End (1975), which provoked a fierce out-
cry by devoted Enderbyans, among whom I number myself. In response to
our laments and protests, Burgess gave us Enderby’s Dark Lady; or, No End
to Enderby, a superb amalgam of Inside Mr. Enderby and Nothing Like the
Sun. It is now to be hoped that Enderby, and “William Shakespeare,” will
last as long as Burgess does, may it be forever.
Inside Mr. Enderby is one of my own candidates for the most underval-
ued English novel of our era, since the raffish narrative clearly has immor-
tality in it. Enderby himself is at once Leopold Bloom, James Joyce,
William Shakespeare, and Anthony Burgess, which is merely outrageous,
and totally successful. As a true poet, Enderby is also Samuel Johnson,
Jonathan Swift, John Keats, Walt Whitman, and perhaps such modern
roisterers as Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, which only means that
Enderby is a universal representation of the fate of the poet in a world nec-
essarily and simultaneously too good for him and not quite good enough
for anyone of imagination.
Everything that is conceivable happens to Enderby, or perhaps rather
Enderby is what happens to everyone else in his world. Like Poldy,
Enderby is the complete man or the compassionate man, except that Poldy
is a Jewish respecter of learning and art and a bit of an artist himself, but
no poet, which is Stephen’s vocation—and Enderby’s. Enderby is also
obsessed by guilt, quite unmerited, whereas Poldy is beyond guilt, being a
kind of Messiah, a text that is an answer, though obscure. The Enderby
books, never obscure, refuse all answers. Amidst so much tawdry splendor,
which never ceases to proliferate, I cite as a favorite passage the sublime
moment when Enderby graciously declines the Goodby gold medal for
poetry at a luncheon in London, a paradigm of all the literary luncheons
where, like Enderby, the critic Bloom has gotten quite drunk:

“And it is for this reason that it gives me pleasure to bestow on our


fellow singing-bird here, er er Enderby, the Goodby gold medal.”
Enderby rose to applause loud enough to drown three cracking
intestinal reports. “And a cheque,” said Sir George, with nostalgia
of poet’s poverty, “that is very very small but, one trusts, will stave
off pangs for a month or two.” Enderby took his trophies, shook
hands, simpered, then sat down again. “Speech,” said somebody.
Novelists and Novels 443

Enderby rose again, with a more subdued report, then realised


that he was unsure of the exordial protocol. Did he say, “Mr.
Chairman”? Was there a chairman? If Sir George was the chair-
man should he say something other than “Mr. Chairman”? Should
he just say, “Sir George, ladies and gentlemen”? But, he noticed,
there seemed to be somebody with a chain of office gleaming on
his chest, hovering in the dusk, a mayor or lord mayor. What
should he say—“Your Worship”? In time he saw that this was
some sort of menial in charge of wine. Holding in wind, a nerv-
ously smiling Aeolus, Enderby said, loud and clear:
“St George.” There was a new stir of tittering. “And the drag-
on,” Enderby now had to add. “A British cymbal,” he continued,
seeing with horror that orthographical howler in a sort of neon
lights before him. “A cymbal that tinkles in unsound brass if we
are without clarity.” There were appreciative easings of buttocks
and shoulders: Enderby was going to make it brief and humorous.
Desperately Enderby said, “As most of us are or are not, as the
case may be. Myself included.” Sir George, he saw, was throwing
up wide face-holes at him, as though he, Enderby, were on a gird-
er above the street. “Clarity,” said Enderby, almost in tears, “is red
wine for yodellers. And so,” he gaped aghast at himself, “I am
overjoyed to hand back this cheque to St George for charitable
disposal. The gold medal he knows what he can do with.” He
could have died with shock and embarrassment at what he was
saying; he was hurled on to the end in killing momentum, howev-
er. “Dross of the workaday world,” he said “as our fellow-singer
Goodby so adequately disproves. And so,” he said, back in the
Army giving a talk on the British Way and Purpose, “we look for-
ward to a time when the world shall be free of the shadow of
oppression, the iron heel with its swastika spur no longer grinding
into the face of supine freedom, democracy a reality, a fair day’s
pay for a fair day’s work, adequate health services and a bit of
peace hovering dovelike in the declining days of the aged. And in
that belief and aspiration we move forward.” He found that he
could not stop. “Forward,” he insisted, “to a time when the world
shall be free of the shadow of oppression.” Sir George had risen
and was tottering out. “A fair day’s work,” said Enderby feebly,
“for a fair day’s pay. Fair play for all,” he mumbled doubtfully. Sit
George had gone. “And thereto,” ended Enderby wretchedly,
“I plight thee my truth.”
444 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

The model for Enderby’s peroration is Poldy’s proclamations of the


New Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future, in the Nighttown
episode of Ulysses, except that Poldy, as always, is sober, while Enderby, as
always, is drunk. In some ways Enderby combines the traits of a Buck
Mulligan emptied out of all malice, with the lovable amiability of Poldy,
gentlest of all representations in fiction. This may be too much of a prob-
lem in depiction for Burgess and may account for the gradual evolution of
Enderby away from Poldy and Joyce and towards Burgess’s “William
Shakespeare,” as the cycle takes its labyrinthine pratfalls on to Enderby’s
Dark Lady. What is certain is that no single Enderby book is quite as effec-
tive as Nothing Like the Sun, not even Inside Mr. Enderby, though finally I
might set that highest in the Burgess canon. For sustained command of
language, Shakespearean and Joycean, Nothing Like the Sun is Burgess’s
most accomplished performance, as here in a vision of Elizabethan
London as the demonic context of the great love affair between
Shakespeare and the dark lady of the Sonnets:

London, the defiled city, became a sweet bower for their lover’s
wandering, even in the August heat. The kites that hovered or,
perched, picked at the flesh of traitors’ skulls became good cleans-
ing birds, bright of eye and feather, part of the bestiary of myth
that enthralled them as they made it. The torn and screaming
bears and dogs and apes in the pits of Paris Garden were martyrs
who rose at once into gold heraldic zoomorphs to support the
scutcheon of their static and sempiternal love. The wretches that
lolled in chains on the lapping edges of the Thames, third tide
washed over, noseless, lipless, eye-eaten, joined the swinging
hanged at Tyburn and the rotting in the jails to be made heroes of
a classical hell that, turned into music by Vergil, was sweet and
pretty schoolday innocence. But it was she who shook her head
often in sadness, smiling beneath her diaphanous veil as they took
the evening air in passion’s convalescence, saying that autumn
would soon be on them, that love’s fire burned flesh and then
itself—out, gone for ever.

This is the only apocalypse acceptable to Burgess, heroic vitalist and


celebrator of the things of this world: “Love’s fire burned flesh and then
itself—out, gone for ever.” That is a burden hardly unique to Burgess, and
the accent remains Joycean, yet the music of this mortality verges upon
being Burgess’s alone.
N O V E L I S T S
Iris Murdoch

A N D
(1919–1999)

N O V E L S
The Good Apprentice

AT THE END OF HER FIRST BOOK, AN ENDURING STUDY OF SARTRE PUBLISHED


in 1953, Iris Murdoch prophetically lamented that Sartre’s “inability to
write a great novel is a tragic symptom of a situation which afflicts us all.”
Her own inability has extended now through twenty-two novels, of which
the best seem to me Bruno’s Dream (1969), The Black Prince (1973), A Word
Child (1975), and her latest, The Good Apprentice. So fecund and exuberant
is Murdoch’s talent that many more novels may be expected from her. If
The Good Apprentice marks the start of her strongest phase, and it may, then
a great novel could yet come, rather surprisingly in the incongruous form
of the nineteenth-century realistic novel. The age of Samuel Beckett and
Thomas Pynchon, post-Joycean and post-Faulknerian, is set aside by
Murdoch’s novelistic procedures, almost as though she thus chose to assert
her own direct continuity with the major nineteenth-century Russian and
British masters of fiction.
Murdoch’s anachronistic style and outmoded narrative devices are not,
in my experience of reading her, the principal flaws in her work. Like
Gabriel García Márquez, she favors a realism that can be more phantas-
magoric than naturalistic, but she tends not to be able to sustain this mixed
mode, whereas he can. Consistency of stance is one of Murdoch’s prob-
lems. She is both fantasist and realist, each on principle, but her abrupt
modulations between the two visions sometimes seem less than fully con-
trolled. Her novels rush by us, each a successful entertainment, but none
perhaps filly distinct from the others in our memories.
Yet her fictions fuse into a social cosmos, one that is reasonably rec-
ognizable as contemporary British upper-middle-class. Of all her talents,

445
446 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the gift of plotting is the most formidable, including a near-


Shakespearean faculty for intricate double plots. Again her strength
seems sometimes uncontrolled, and even the most responsive reader can
feel harried and at last indifferent as labyrinthine developments work
themselves through. Yet that is how Murdoch tends to manifest her con-
siderable exuberance as a writer, rather than in the creation of endless
otherness in her characters, which nevertheless (and rather sadly) seems
to constitute her largest ambition. She does not excel at fresh invention
of personalities. We learn to expect certain basic types to repeat them-
selves in her novels: fierce, very young women, compulsive and cunning,
violent in their pursuit of much older men, are omnipresent. Their quar-
ry, those older men, are narcissistic charmers but weak, self-indulgent,
hesitant skeptics, fearful of reality. Then there are the power figures
whom Murdoch once called “alien gods.” These are frequently male,
Middle European, Jewish charismatics, who may be presumed to have
some allegorical or ironic link to the writer Elias Canetti, a friend of
Murdoch in her youth. Unfulfilled older women abound also; they are
marked by resentment, identity anxieties, and by a tendency to fall in
love drastically, absurdly, and abruptly.
Murdoch’s particular mastery is in representing the maelstrom of
falling in love, which is the characteristic activity of nearly all her men and
women, who somehow have time for busy professional careers in London
while obsessively suffering convulsive love relationships. Somewhere in
one of her early novels, Murdoch cannily observes that falling out of love
is one of the great human experiences, a kind of rebirth in which we see
the world with freshly awakened eyes. Though an academic philosopher
earlier in her career, Murdoch’s actual philosophical achievement is locat-
ed where she clearly wishes it to be, in her novels, which demonstrate her
to be a major student of Eros, not of the stature of Freud or Proust, but
still an original and endlessly provocative theorist of the tragicomedy of
sexual love, with its peculiar hell of jealousy and self-hatred. Her nearest
American equivalent in this dark area is Saul Bellow, a novelist whom oth-
erwise she does not much resemble.
Indeed, she resembles no other contemporary novelist, in part because
she is essentially a religious fabulist, of an original and unorthodox sort,
and therefore very unlike Graham Greene or John Updike or Walker
Percy or Cynthia Ozick, whose varied religious outlooks are located in
more definite normative traditions. Murdoch thinks for herself theologi-
cally as well as philosophically, and her conceptual originality is difficult
for readers to apprehend, particularly when it is veiled by her convention-
al forms of storytelling and her rather mixed success in the representation
Novelists and Novels 447

of original characters. There is a perpetual incongruity between Murdoch’s


formulaic procedures and her spiritual insights, an incongruity that con-
tinues in The Good Apprentice.
The good apprentice is twenty-year-old Edward Baltram, a university
student who begins the novel by slyly feeding a drug-laden sandwich to his
best friend and fellow-student Mark Wilsden. While Edward goes off to
make love to a girl in the neighborhood, Mark wakes up and falls or jumps
out of the window to his death. Edward’s grief and guilt dominate the
book, which is his quest for a secular absolution at the hands of his actual
father, Jesse Bahrain, an insane vitalist and reclusive painter who begat
Edward upon one of his models and subsequently has not seen his son
apart from a childhood meeting or two. Murdoch’s ironic opening sen-
tence is the novels spiritual signature:

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I
have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more wor-
thy to be called thy son.

In a narrative that chronicles Edward’s journey from hell to purgato-


ry, we might expect that Edward would encounter at least one figure who
unequivocally embodies love, wisdom, or at least power. But that underes-
timates Murdoch’s authentic spiritual originality which has now matured
to the point that all such figures are negated. Though Edward regards
himself as a dead soul, he is nevertheless the book’s only legitimate repre-
sentative of the good, in however apprentice a guise. His elders all fail him,
and themselves are exposed as souls deader than he is. Jesse Baltram, his
mad father, is a magician but a perpetually dying one until his mysterious
death by water. Mother May, Jesse’s wife, seems at first as charming and
innocent as her daughters, Bettina and Ilona, Edward’s half-sisters, and the
long middle section of the book set at Seegard, Jesse’s estate, begins as the
most beautiful of all Murdoch’s pastoral idylls. But May is revealed to he
scheming, resentful, and jealous, Bettina scarcely less so, and the ineffable
Ilona is transmogrified into a Soho stripper. The book’s wisdom figure,
Thomas McCaskerville, Edward’s uncle by marriage, is at once a subtle
Scottish-Jewish psychoanalyst, uttering a parodistic version of R.D.
Laing’s madness-as-spiritual-journey ideology, and also a bemused cuck-
old, preaching about the reality principle of death while understanding
very little of life as it touches him most closely.
With her alien gods and charismatics so discredited, Murdoch boldly
steps into their place herself, editorializing directly about her characters’
psychological and spiritual miseries. Here she analyzes the meditative
448 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

stance of Stuart, Edward’s step-brother and foil, who also has rejected life
in favor of a death that might precede a more abundant life:

A disinterested observer might have wondered why Stuart so


ardently rejected God, since he did not simply sit and meditate, he
also knelt down, sometimes even prostrated himself. Once again,
Stuart, recognising no problem, instinctively resolved apparent
contradictions. Meditation was refuge, quietness, purification,
replenishing, return to whiteness. Prayer was struggle, reflection,
self-examination, it was more particular, involving concern about
other people and naming of names. Harry had said that Stuart
wanted to be like Job, always guilty before God, an exalted form
of sadomasochism. Stuart’s rejection of God was, in effect, his
rejection of that “old story,” to use Ursula’s words, as alien to his
being. His mind refused it, spewed it out, not as a dangerous
temptation, but as alien tissue. Of course he wanted to be “good”;
and so he wanted to avoid guilt and remorse, but those states did
not interest him. Towards his sins and failures he felt cold, no
warmth was generated there. So little did he feel himself menaced
from that quarter that in prayer he would even say (for he used
words) dominus et deus, without attaching the old meaning to those
dread sounds. (Perhaps it was important that the words were
Latin, not English.) He knew there was no supernatural being and
did not design to try to attach the concept in any way to his
absolutes. If something, “good” or something, was his “master,” it
was in no personal or reciprocal relation. His language was thus
indeed odd as when he sometimes said “forgive me,” or “help me,”
or when he commended others, Edward for instance, to the pos-
sibility of being helped. Stuart understood the phrase “love is only
of God”; his love went out into the cosmos as a lonely signal, but
also miraculously could return to earth. His belief that his suppli-
cation for Edward, his concern for Edward, could help Edward
was not a hypothesis about actions which he might, as a result of
well-intentioned thoughts, later perform for his brother (though
this aspect of the matter was not excluded); nor of course was he
resorting to some paranormal telepathic form of healing. He sim-
ply felt sure that the purer his love the more efficacious it would
be in some “immediate” sense which put in question the ordinary
pit-pat of time.

Admirers of Murdoch are fond of defending such authorial


Novelists and Novels 449

interpolations by citing their prevalence in the nineteenth-centu-


ry novel. It is certainly true that George Eliot is never more impressive
than in such interventions, and Murdoch indeed is recognizably in Eliot’s
explicitly moral tradition. Unfortunately, what worked sublimely for Eliot
cannot work so well for Murdoch, despite her engaging refusal to be self-
conscious about her belatedness. As speculation, this paragraph is impres-
sive, but as fiction it makes us wonder why Murdoch tells us what we expect
her to show us. Her gifts for dramatic action are considerable, but her own
narrative voice lacks George Eliot’s authority, being too qualified and fussy
when a rugged simplicity is required. She is no less acute a moral analyst
than Eliot, but she does not persuade us that her judgments are a necessary
part of the story she has made for us.
Yet I do not wish to slight her conceptual strength as a religious writer,
which is her particular excellence, since she has taught herself how subtly
story and tragic, narrative art and the questing spirit, can fuse in a novel,
even if the fusion is incomplete so far in her work. Starting as an existen-
tialist writer in Under the Net, she has evolved into that curious oxymoron,
a Platonist novelist, perpetually in pursuit of the Good, a quest that she
herself parodies in the hilarious and painful couplings of her erotomaniac
protagonists. Her obsessive symbol for this sadomasochistic pattern is the
myth of Apollo and Marsyas, which was exploited in The Black Prince and
several other novels, and which is repeated in The Good Apprentice. Marsyas
the musician, having challenged Apollo to a music contest, loses and suf-
fers the penalty of being flayed to death. Murdoch reads the myth so that
the agony of Marsyas is our agony now in seeking to know God in an age
when God is dead. So, in The Good Apprentice:

Thomas recalled Edward’s weird exalted stare, his uncanny smile.


A (lemon who had nothing to do with the well-being of the ordi-
nary “real” Edward had for a moment looked out. How ambigu-
ous such conditions were. The entranced face of the tortured
Marsyas, as Apollo kneels lovingly to tear his skin off, prefigures
the death and resurrection of the soul.

Our shudder here is not shared by Murdoch, whose version of a post-


Christian religion is marked by violence and deathliness. Whatever
Socrates meant by saying we should study dying, Murdoch harshly means
that death is the truth, since it destroys every image and every story. Her
savage Platonism in the novels is consistent with her stance in The Fire and
the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977):
450 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Escape from the Cave and approach to the Good is a progressive


discarding of relative false goods, of hypotheses, images, and shad-
ows, eventually seen as such.

These are the accents not just of a Platonic exegesis, but of Murdoch’s
firmest beliefs, expressed overtly in the closing paragraph of The Fire and
the Sun:

Plato feared the consolations of art. He did not offer a consoling


theology. His psychological realism depicted God as subjecting
mankind to a judgment as relentless as that of the old Zeus,
although more just. A finely meshed moral causality determines
the fate of the soul. That the movement of the saving of Eros is
toward an impersonal pictureless void is one of the paradoxes of a
complete religion. To present the idea of God at all, even as myth,
is a consolation, since it is impossible to defend this image against
the prettifying attentions of art. Art will mediate and adorn, and
develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his
distance. We live now amid the collapse of many such structures,
and as religion and metaphysics in the West withdraw from the
embraces of art, we are it might seem being forced to become
mystics through the lack of any imagery which could satisfy the
mind. Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never
go away and there is no end to their collusion with art and to the
consolations which, perhaps fortunately for the human race, they
can provide; and art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing
for better and for worse.

This bitter Platonism resembles that of Simone Weil, a powerful early


influence upon Murdoch. Whatever one thinks of the spiritual stance of
Weil and Murdoch (I personally find it repellant), it seems at once anti-
thetical to the interests of art yet also a powerful goad to Murdoch’s devel-
opment as a novelist who exploits magic while endlessly disowning it.
The Good Apprentice seems to me an advance upon all of Murdoch’s
previous novels, even The Black Prince, because the morally ferocious
Platonist finally has allowed herself a wholly sympathetic protagonist in
the self purging Edward. His progress out of an inner hell has no false con-
solations or illusory images haunting it. In some sense, Edward’s achieve-
ment and torment is wholly Freudian in its spirit, resembling as it does the
later Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle through Civilization and Its
Discontents. Freud’s last vestige of Platonism, his only transcendentalism,
Novelists and Novels 451

was his worship of reality testing or the reality principle, which was his way
of naming the conditions imposed by the outwardness of the world, whose
final form is death. Murdoch’s only consistent transcendentalism is grimly
parallel to Freud’s, since her novels insist that religious consciousness, in
our post-religious era, must begin with the conviction that only death cen-
ters life, that death is the only valid representation of a life better than the
life-in-death we all suffer daily.
This is the impressive if rather stark structure that Murdoch imposes
upon The Good Apprentice, where the first section is called “The Prodigal
Son,” and depicts Edward’s descent into a private hell, and the second,
“Seegard,” recounts his purgatorial search for his enigmatic magician of a
father. The third and last part Murdoch names “Life After Death,” imply-
ing that the still anguished Edward has begun an ascent into the upper
reaches of his personal purgatory.
Like nearly all of her twenty-two novels, Murdoch’s The Good
Apprentice has a surface that constitutes a brilliant entertainment, a social
comedy of and for the highly literate. Beneath that surface an astringent
post-Christian Platonism has evolved into a negative theology that prag-
matically offers only the Gnostic alternatives of either total libertinism or
total puritanism in the moral life. The aesthetic puzzle is whether the
comic story and the Platonic kernel can be held together by Murdoch’s
archaic stance as an authorial will. And yet no other contemporary British
novelist seems to me of Murdoch’s eminence. Her formidable combination
of intellectual drive and storytelling exuberance may never fuse into a great
novel, but she has earned now the tribute she made to Jean Paul Sartre
more than thirty years ago. She too has the style of the age.
N O V E L S
A N D

William Gaddis
N O V E L I S T S

(1922–1998)

The Recognitions

MY ONE PERSONAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM GADDIS GOES BACK TO A MEETING


of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, sometime in the later 1990s.
We had been introduced perhaps a year before, and he approached me,
expressing gratification that I had included The Recognitions in a canonical
catalog published in 1994. Not knowing him, yet apprehending that his
grave and courteous manner did not seem ironic, I stammered that I had
admired the novel since 1955, when it was first published, and had reread
it several times since, always with a sense of gratitude. Gaddis graciously
nodded his head, and walked away. Returning to New Haven that night, I
rather weirdly found a copy of the Penguin paperback of The Recognitions in
my briefcase, where I had not placed it.
This oddity (and I still do not know how the book got there) reflects
for me the uncanniness of The Recognitions, where the inexplicable is mar-
velously omnipresent, in an almost Dickensian way. Jonathan Raban sensi-
bly notes that Gaddis, the first so-called Post-Modernist of the American
novel, actually is Victorian in sensibility, and might well have pleased
Trollope. I wish I could share Raban’s admiration for A Frolic of His Own,
or my close friend the novelist Walter Abish’s high regard for JR, but alas
I don’t. Carpenter’s Gothic also continues to evade me, though it has a legit-
imate place in a tradition that moves from Brockden Brown through
Hawthorne on to Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy.
The Recognitions is so rich a work that Gaddis could have rested on his
oars forever. It has an authentic literary lineage that begins with the Third
Century Clementine Recognitions, an early Christian romance. Simon
Magus, supposed by some to be the inventor of Gnosticism, is the villain of

452
Novelists and Novels 453

this curious tale, and this Simon of Samaria, known as the Magus, is the
first manifestation of Faustus, the Favored one. Gaddis also draws upon St.
Augustine and St. John of the Cross, but is closer in spirit to Melville’s
Moby-Dick, to Goethe’s Faust, and very overtly to T.S. Eliot, whose “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land and Four Quartets are
echoed throughout. In a rather disturbing way, The Recognitions parodies
Joyce’s Ulysses, which Gaddis insisted he never had read.
The influence of The Recognitions upon novelists from Thomas
Pynchon to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is palpable, and not always
fortunate, but Gaddis’s outrageous first fiction bridges the long morass in
the American novel from Faulkner’s major phase to the full maturing of
Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy, and to Pynchon’s tri-
umphant resurrection in Mason and Dixon. Doubtless the death of
Nathanael West, in a car crash, removed an extraordinary imagination far
too early, and yet it cleared a visionary space for Gaddis, who was thirty-
three, the Chistological age, when The Recognitions appeared.
Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Gaddis’s masterwork is less a narrative fiction than
it is an epic of consciousness. But whose consciousness? Hamlet has his own
consciousness, different from what we may infer was Shakespeare’s, yet we
are not persuaded that Wyatt Gwyon has a mind all his own. Willie the
writer (see pp. 272–3 and 478 of The Recognitions) is the endless conscious-
ness of his book, and the implicit protagonist of its quest for transcen-
dence.
The Recognitions goes on for fifty-six pages after we behold the last of
Wyatt on page 900:

He had left his windows opened, and the bird was sitting on one
of the framed pictures when he came in, and closed the door
behind him.
But he had already paused to make his notation, “What mean?”
before he saw it, when it fluttered across the room to the other
picture, and though he tried frantically to chase it toward the
front, toward the windows and out, it fluttered the more franti-
cally from one picture to the other, and back across the room and
back, as he passed the mirror himself in both directions, where he
might have glimpsed the face of a man having, or about to have,
or at the very least valiantly fighting off, a religious experience.

The religious experience, conveyed by gentle irony, is the descent of


the dove, the Pentecost of the Paraclete, Christ-as-comforter. Here
Gaddis affects the ambiguous undulations of the end of Pynchon’s The
454 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Crying of Lot 49, and the more overt intimations of a possible transcen-
dence that culminate Don DeLillo’s major works, from White Noise
through Underworld. The sequence of Gaddis, Pynchon, and DeLillo con-
stitutes an ambivalent opening to glory in ongoing American fiction.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
José Saramago
(1922–)

N O V E L S
REREADING SARAMAGO, I ALWAYS FEEL LIKE ULYSSES TRYING TO KEEP MY
hold on Proteus, the metamorphic god of ocean; he keeps slipping away.
From Baltasar and Blimunda on through The Cave, Saramago is in constant
change, not merely from fiction to fiction, but within each work. I don’t
know the genre of any of his books, except his masterpiece (in my view),
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, as that I suppose has to be called a
gospel, though it brings very bad news indeed: a Jesus betrayed by God the
Father; a Satan who is a mild bystander, really a good shepherd, and so
named Pastor; a God so self-indulgent that he sacrifices Jesus solely in
order to extend his worshippers from the small elite of the Jews, to a myr-
iad of Christians. There is also this God’s evident, sadistic relish in sacri-
ficing not only Jesus but a vast array of subsequent martyrs, all tortured to
death or executed by an exuberant panoply of ingenious devices.
But I have considered Saramago’s Gospel elsewhere, and shall revisit it
later only in passing. Here I begin with the outrageous and delicious
Baltasar and Blimunda (1987), though to characterize any single narrative by
Saramago as being more deliciously outrageous than the others is a dis-
putable judgment.
T.S. Eliot was fond of describing himself as Anglo-Catholic, Royalist,
and classicist. He could have added anti-Semite, and I have always won-
dered how he would have reacted had Great Britain been successfully
invaded and occupied by the Nazis? I don’t know that Saramago needs to
describe himself at all: he is certainly neither Catholic nor Royalist, and he
is too diverse and inventive for any stance like classicist to subsume him.
Like Jorge Luis Borges, Saramago is a free man, and his books exalt free-
dom, generally by depicting its dreadful alternatives. Baltasar and Blimunda
is Saramago’s historical romance, set in the frightening Portugal of the

455
456 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

early eighteenth century, a country where the Enlightenment had not yet
arrived. Public entertainment still was constituted by acts of faith, in which
heretics, Jews, and everyone else who offended either Church or King
were burned alive, to the edification of the true believers.
These fires burn throughout the book, but most dreadfully at the
close, when Baltasar is consumed. He is an admirable soul, as is his beloved
seeress Blimunda, but I defer consideration of them until further on, when
I can compare their tragic love to other erotic splendors in Saramago. The
other visionary center of this turbulent book is the inventive and heretical
Padre Bartholomew Lorenzo, an actual personage, who arrived in
Portugal from Brazil in 1708. Known to his enemies as “the Flying Man,”
he invented a bird-like flying machine, called “La passarola,” which figures
crucially in Saramago’s story. I assume Saramago invented the magnificent
notion that Domenico Scarlatti himself serenades Baltasar as the one-
handed former soldier builds the “Passarola” designed by Padre Lourenço.
It is pure Saramago that the fuel for the flying bird should be provid-
ed by Blimunda, who has the unique power to bottle human wills. No sur-
prise here; we are in a romance where the seagulls are “anxious to know if
God has aged much.” It is however a romance that crosses over into
scabrous realism:

People are saying that the realm is badly governed, and that there
is no justice. They fail to understand that this is how the realm
ought to be, with its eyes blindfolded and bearing its scales and
sword. What more could we wish for, when that is all that has
been required: that we should be the weavers of bandages, the
inspectors of the weights, the armorers of the sword, constantly
mending the holes, adjusting the balance, sharpening the edge of
the blade, and then asking the defendant if he is satisfied with the
sentence passed on him once he has won or lost his case. We are
not referring here to sentences passed by the Holy Office of the
Inquisition, which is very astute and prefers an olive branch to
scales and a keen blade to one that is jagged and blunt. Some mis-
take the olive branch as a gesture of peace when it is all too clear
that it is kindling wood for the funeral pyre. Either I stab you or I
burn you. Therefore, in the absence of any law, it is preferable to
stab a woman suspected of infidelity than to honor the faithful
who have passed on. It is a question of having protectors who are
likely to forgive homicide, and a thousand cruzados to put on the
scales, which explains why justice holds the latter in her hand. Let
blacks and hoodlums be punished so that the importance of good
Novelists and Novels 457

example may be upheld. Let people of rank and wealth be hon-


ored, without demanding that they pay their debts, that they
renounce vengeance or mitigate their hatred. And while the law-
suits are being fought, since certain little irregularities cannot be
totally avoided, let there be chicanery, swindling, appeals, formal-
ities, and evasions, so that those likely to gain a just decision will
not gain it too readily, and those likely to lose their appeal will not
lose it too soon. In the meantime teats are milked for that deli-
cious milk, money, those rich curds, prime cheese, and a tasty
morsel for the bailiff and the solicitor, for the witness and the
judge;

Saramago’s Swiftian irony will become subtler in later books, but one is
dazzled by its pungency here, with that marvelous, pragmatic motto for the
Inquisition: “Either I stab you or I burn you.” We are not quite in the
United States of the second George Bush or in contemporary Portugal,
but the implications are there. A great moment comes when the lovers and
Padre Lourenço take off together in the Passarolo. As they descend,
Saramago invokes the image of Camões, the heroic one-eyed national war-
rior-epic poet:

Who knows what dangers await them, what Adamastor they will
encounter, what Saint Elmo’s fires they will see rise from the sea,
what columns of water will suck in the air only to expel it once it
has been settled? Then Blimunda asks where are we going. And
the priest replies: where the arm of the Inquisition cannot reach
us if such a place exists.

They come down in the mountains, and Lourenço disappears. Baltasar


and Blimunda make their way to his parents’ home, where eventually
Scarlatti will come to tell them that Padre Bartholomew, pursued by the
Inquisition, escaped to Spain and then died in Toledo. Poor Baltasar is
impressed into a work crew to build a great Franciscan convent. When he
gets free again, he finds and flies in the Passarolo. Meanwhile, poor
Blimunda, who is being raped by a properly pious friar, kills him with the
detachable spike that Baltasar usually wears. For nine long years, Blimunda
searches for her Baltasar, and finds him already burning in a glorious act-
of-faith involving the usual collection of Jews, playwrights, and similar riff-
raff.
Then Blimunda said: Come. The will of Baltasar Sete-Sóis broke free
from his body, but did not ascend to the stars, for it belonged to the earth
458 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

and to Blimunda. Though this is a marvelous aesthetic conclusion, it leaves


us a little sad. What can happen next? Perhaps Blimunda will find the
Passarola and use Baltasar’s will for a final flight, but she will be alone in a
melancholy freedom, wherever she lands, if ever she lands. Portugal in the
early 18th century has yielded us the following. The country is Hell, gov-
erned by a viciously stupid royal family, and tortured incessantly by a
Church indistinguishable from the Inquisition. What saves it from hellish-
ness? Only four beings: the partly Jewish witch Blimunda; the heroic,
Cervantes-like one-armed soldier, Baltasar; the inventor of the Passarolo,
Padre Lourenço, who converts to the unitive God of Judaism, and then
goes off to die in Spain; and the survivor, Domenico Scarlatti, who will go
on playing his ethereal melodies that alone redeem such a world. Saramago
prophetically consigns Portugal, the Catholic Church and the monarchy
to the hell of history. The Passarola, image of illusory freedom, saves no
one, and its great inventor exiles himself to die in Toledo. Our lovers never
totally lose one another and what redeems the book is Saramago’s real love
for them, which transcends all his ironies. I pass to the wonderful irreality
of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984). We are in Hell again, that is
to say historical Portugal in December 1935, with Salazar come to power,
and Spain about to endure the Fascist usurpation. Acts of faith will be per-
formed by machine guns and rifles, less pleasant to God than the aroma of
burning flesh. Our hero is the amiable poet, Dr. Ricardo Reis, one of
Pessoa’s heteronyms: a mild, Horatian Epicurean, who has returned from
Brazil to Lisbon. He checks into his hotel, and then goes out to read a
newspaper that reports the death of Fernando Pessoa, and naturally pays a
visit of respect to his creator’s tomb. Already we have had allusions to Eça
and to Borges: we are in the reality of the fabulists and poets.
Ricardo Reis pursues two erotic quests, an idealized one for Marcenda,
paralyzed in her left hand, and a fleshly one with Lydia, the hotel cham-
bermaid. But first he returns from dinner, to find the ghostly Pessoa wait-
ing for him in his hotel room, and they converse like the old friends they
are. They will go on meeting, since ghosts have eight months of freedom,
and in the meantime Lydia enters the bed of Ricardo Reis.
Though Salazar’s Portugal is always in the background, we essentially
are in a pleasant realm: literary, erotic, nostalgic. I pause to note that I
know no other novelistic atmosphere at all like the ambiance of The Year of
the Death of Ricardo Reis. It is an utterly new mode of aestheticism: both
visionary and realistic, the cosmos of the great poet Pessoa and of the
Fascist dictator Salazar and yet it presents us also with an original literary
enigma: how long can Ricardo Reis survive the death of Fernando Pessoa?
For three hundred and fifty pages we have experienced the life and loves
Novelists and Novels 459

of a heteronym. What a triumph for Pessoa, and for Saramago. The novel’s
beautifully modulated closing passage has an utterly unprecedented tonal-
ity:

As they left the apartment, Fernando Pessoa told him, you forgot
your hat. You know better than I do that hats aren’t worn where
we’re going. On the sidewalk opposite the park, they watched the
pale lights flicker on the river, the ominous shadows of the moun-
tains. Let’s go then, said Fernando Pessoa. Let’s go, agreed
Ricardo Reis. Adamastor did not turn around to look, perhaps
afraid that if he did, he might let out finally his mighty howl.
Here, where the sea ends and the earth awaits.

The will of Baltasar belonged to Blimunda and the earth, and the earth
awaits both poets, Pessoa and Reis. The earth is always waiting for us in
Saramago; at the close of his magnificent fantasy, The Stone Raft (1986), we
are gently assured: “The elm branch is green. Perhaps it will flower again
next year.” The book’s epigraph quotes the great Cuban fabulist, Alejo
Carpentier, who is of Saramago’s school: “Every future is fabulous.” In
Carpentier, yes, but in Saramago, these things are ordered differently.
That elm branch starts all the trouble anyway, and converts Iberia into a
stone raft, after Joana Carda scratches the ground with it, having no idea
it was a magic wand. The genius of Saramago is off and running, fulfilling
its destiny of disturbing us into a fuller realization of what it means to read
and to write.
It would madden me, and all of us, if I attempted to summarize this sub-
limely zany narrative. Its given is summary enough; the entire slab of Spain
and Portugal has spun loose from Europe, and heads out into the Atlantic.
Saramago’s aesthetic burden therefore is immense; if you start your story
with that, how are you to catch up to yourself? I retract; there is no aesthet-
ic burden for the cunning Saramago. We never get at all far from that orig-
inal outrage. It is almost halfway through the novel, on page 127, that Joanna
Carda explains why and how the catastrophe happened? She required a sym-
bolic act to indicate that she was separating from her husband: They are
standing on the edge of the clearing, Joana Carda detains the men a bit
longer, these are her final words, I picked up the stick from the ground, the
wood seemed to be living as if it were the whole tree from which it had been
cut, or rather this is what I now feel as it comes back to me, and at that
moment, with a gesture more like a child’s than an adult’s, I drew a line that
separated me forever from Coimbra and the man with whom I lived, a line
that divided the world into two halves, as you can see from here.
460 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

They advanced to the middle of the clearing, drew close, there was the
line, as clear as if it had just been drawn, the earth piled up on either side,
the bottom layer still damp despite the warmth of the sun. They remain
silent, the men are at a loss for words, Joana Carda has nothing more to
say, this is the moment for a daring gesture that could make a mockery of
her wonderful tale. She drags one foot over the ground, smooths the soil
as if she were using a level, stamps on it and presses down, as if commit-
ting an act of sacrilege. The next moment, before the astonished gaze of
all the onlookers, the line reappears, it looks exactly as it was before, the
tiny particles of soil, the grains of sand resume their previous shape and
form, return to where they were before, and the line is back. Between the
part that was obliterated and the rest, between one side and the other,
there is no visible difference. Her nerves on edge, Joana Carda says in a
shrill voice, I’ve already swept away the entire line, I’ve covered it with
water, yet it keeps reappearing, try for yourselves if you wish, I even put
stones on top, and when I removed them the line was still there, why don’t
you try if you still need convincing.
Nothing works; she is accurate. When then is to be done? Saramago,
who is the Devil, is not so much making fun of Europe, or even of Nato or
the European Community, but of the ultimate ideas of the geopolitical, the
geological, and of all related fantasies that pass as realities. By page 139. he
is in a hilarious ecstasy:

Let us wage that we will ultimately be reduced to a single nation,


the quintessence of the European spirit, a single and perfect sub-
limation, Europe, namely, Switzerland.

The joke, once started cannot be stopped. The late J.F.K. is permanently
repaid for his “Ich bin ein Berliner” when all Europe is swept by the slo-
gan: We also are Iberians. Anarchist outrages follow, as millions of youths
repeat the Great Awakening of the late 1960’s, smashing TV stations and
shop-fronts, turning Europe into Seattle: For the catalogs of memoirs and
reminiscences there remained those dying words of the handsome young
Dutchman hit by a rubber bullet ... At last, I’m Iberian, and with these
words he expired ...
Except for Joana Carda, I have not mentioned the three other early
protagonists, and don’t really want to, because they are mere males and
they do not seem as important as the curious dog who tags along through-
out. Or rather, they tag along, as only the dog seems to know where they
are going. One of them, José Anaiço, is taken, by Joana Carda. Another,
Joaquim Sassa, will be selected by Maire Guavaira, to whose house the dog
Novelists and Novels 461

leads them. That leaves Pedro Orce, who is closest to the wise dog, whose
name sometimes in Pilot. Now that everyone has a home, the peninsula’s
dilemma remains: Portugal is rushing towards the Azores. In a general
time of anxiety and exodus, we now see that Saramago has constructed an
oasis, where two women, three men, a dog, and now also a horse, live in
perfect harmony. Fortunately, Iberia alters course, and there is no disaster,
and the little group (the dog now named Constant) waits to see whether
they will surge on to join Canada or the United States.
Sadly, our little community falls out, for a time, even as Portugal and
Spain drift towards North America. But the peninsula begins to move
away, and rotate, and Pedro Orce dies, and everyone weeps, the dog
included. He is buried, the dog Ardent departs, the peninsula has stopped,
and the two couples will continue on their wanderings, carrying the elm
branch with them.
This rugged narrative does not want to be interpreted, nor should we
be tactless, but I will hover round it, as Werner Herzog keeps our eyes cir-
cling his raft in Aguirre the Wrath of God (my favorite movie, with Klaus
Kinski as Aguirre as Kinski). We don’t ever see why Joana should want José
Anaiço, whose only salient quality is that he activates starlings, or again
why Maria takes Sassa, whose role as stone-thrower into oceans hardly
seems enough to individuate him. Pedro Orce has the Hemingwayesque
ability to kick up earth-tremblings, but all it gets him is the dog. The book-
long hegira of the group cannot sustain interpretation or rather interprets
itself as a sustained irony. At least these men and women are not going to
become the unctuous Portuguese prime-minister, who drones on exhort-
ing the noble Portuguese to be steadfast while he secretly entreats Galicia
to come over to Portugal. The Church, after being obliterated in Baltasar
and Blimunda and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, is largely ignored in
The Stone Raft, presumably because Saramago was preserving his firepow-
er for the Christian God in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991).
The Gospel, as I’ve said already, seems to me Saramago upon his
heights, but as I’ve written about it elsewhere at some length I want here
only to admire its sexual love affair between Jesus Christ and Mary
Magdalene, which is the most poignant and persuasive of all Saramago’s
High Romantic couplings. It breathes authentic ardour; read it side-by-
side with the roughly similar matter in D.H. Lawrence’s The Man Who
Died, and Saramago will win the palm.
I have passed over my personal favorite in Saramago, The History of
the Siege of Lisbon (1989), because I want to dwell awhile in this magnifi-
cent demonstration that there is no history, only biography, as Emerson
polemically assured us. Saramago, more pugnaciously, tells us that there
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is no history, only fiction, but Emerson hardly would have been bothered,
since for him fiction was only another mask for biography. I add the asser-
tion of the divine Oscar Wilde, which is that the highest criticism is the
only form of autobiography that avoids vulgarity. Fusing Emerson,
Saramago, and Wilde I joyously join in The History of the Siege of Lisbon.
In 1147 the King of Portugal took Lisbon back from the Moors with
significant aid from Crusaders, European knights battling at the Church’s
summons. Raimundo Silva, a proofreader, audaciously revises this history, so
that only the Portuguese King retakes his own capital. Though I regard The
Gospel According to Jesus Christ as Saramago’s masterwork to date, I love The
History of the Siege of Lisbon best among his books because it is the most light-
hearted. The Stone Raft is crossed by the irony of Europe’s hypocrisies, and
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is a parable of the triumph of Iberian
Fascism. Baltasar and Blimunda is properly full of scorn of Church and
Kingdom, but that also curbs exuberance. The later books—Blindness and All
the Names—are dark works, though to very different degrees. For me the
heart of Saramago is The History of the Siege of Lisbon, possibly because it
communicates so freely Saramago’s own pleasure in his work. But, going on
seventy-one, I am willing to be sentimental. The love-story of Raimundo
Silva and Maria Sara is sweet, not bittersweet. It breathes wholeheartedness,
and is gentler, easier to linger with than the sublime embrace of Mary
Magdalene and God’s victimized son, Jesus Christ. Both Raimundo and
Maria Sara are weather-beaten, and the mutual love that comes to them is an
enchantment for the reader, whoever she or he is.
But I digress to Saramago’s Journey to Portugal (1990), which arrived in
the midst of this meditation, and gives me a more personal insight into
someone whom I regard as our planet’s strongest living novelist, beyond
any contemporary European or any of the Americans, whether they write
in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Journey to Portugal pursues the nation’s
culture and history, but as only the living eminence of that culture could
seek it. The traveller is like William Blake’s Mental Traveller, who makes
the observations of a visionary. An American reviewer, long resident in
Portugal, deprecated Saramago’s Journey, saying it was not useful, but it
does not take a great imaginer to compose a guide-book. Like Blake,
Saramago sees through the eye, not with it. The traveler gives us the spiri-
tual form of Portugal: a compound of culture and history with what only
the inner eye can behold. Sometimes, in reading Journey to Portugal, I am
haunted by subtly complex intimations of the dark novel of 1995, the dis-
turbing fantasy called Blindness. Only so comprehensive and searching a
seer would turn, years later, to such a fantasy. To see so much, and so well,
is to anticipate the terrors and yet also the dignity of loss.
Novelists and Novels 463

The concept of dignity returns me to the love of Maria Sara and


Raimundo, and to the humane comedy of The History of the Siege of Lisbon.
This is the most charming of Saramago’s books; the novelist himself is so
moved by the love of Raimundo and Maria Sara that he all but abdicates
social satire, though his genius for irony manifests itself incessantly.
Whenever I seek to introduce friends or students to Saramago, I suggest
they begin with The Siege of Lisbon, surely a fiction that every sensitive
reader of good will would embrace.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) changed these notes to that
of cosmological tragedy. Saramago’s Jesus, his God, his devil: all are open
to interpretation, including Saramago’s own, with which I do not always
agree. Myself a Jewish Gnostic by persuasion, I am delighted by the hang-
man God of Saramago’s Gospel, but I suspect that Saramago may agree with
his own Christ’s benign farewell to the heavenly father: “Men, forgive
Him, for He knows not what He has done.” If that is not irony, what is it?
The Gospel, in my reading, stands apart among Saramago’s fictions,
partly because of its aesthetic eminence, yet also because I cannot locate
Saramago in it. He has always, as narrator, been his own best character:
both in and out of his work, and watching and wondering at it. But where
he stands in his Gospel seems disputable. “He stands with his Jesus Christ”
might be the answer, but only extends the question. The Gospel’s God is
certainly worthy of denial: he is the unpleasantest person in all of
Saramago. But here I am perhaps at odds with Saramago and would prefer
that anyone interested consult my extended essay on the Gospel.
Blindness (1995) reminds us again of Saramago’s uncanny power as a
fabulist, but also as an imaginative moralist. Nothing in contemporary fic-
tion reveals so clearly the contingent nature of our social realities.
Saramago’s deepest insight is that our mundane existence is profoundly
fragile, dependent upon givens that may be withdrawn any instant. If I
compare Blindness with The Plague by Camus, I find I favor Saramago.
Whether or not intentional, the open nature of the allegory in Blindness
allows the reader to wonder if this is not another parable of the perpetual
possibility of the return of Fascism, or of its first advent. As with the Gospel,
this austere masterpiece is too complex for simple summary, and I hope to
write of it elsewhere.
Saramago’s Portuguese is still too difficult for me, and so I eagerly
await the English translation of his Caverno. I close here with a brief coda
on All the Names (1997), his closest approach to Kafka, though light years
from Kafka’s “Plenty of hope, for God, but not for us.” Senhor José, clerki-
est of clerks, quests for an unknown woman, who alas is dead. And that is
all. And that is far from all, for since you only can love what you cannot
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ever know, completely, Senhor José cannot abandon the quest. Perhaps not
Kafka, but a curious blend of Robert Louis Stevenson and Melville, might
be the paradigm, but the vision of Saramago has Borgesian elements in it,
and these precursors are folded in a single flame.
The Registrar, for whom Senhor José works, seems to me less God
than he is Saramago himself, teaching men and women of letters that: “we
who write and manipulate the papers of life and death should reunite the
dead and living in one single archive.” As a literary critic, I take heart from
the wisdom of Saramago. For what am I but one of the last Defenders of
the Old Aesthetic Faith, the trust in the Covenant between the writers of
genius and the discerning reader?

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

José Saramago published The Gospel According to Jesus Christ in 1991, when
he approached his seventieth year. As Saramago’s fierce critical admirer, I
am reluctant to choose it over all his other novels, but it is an awesome
work, imaginatively superior to any other life of Jesus, including the four
canonical Gospels. It loses some aspects of irony in Giovanni Pontiero’s
fine translation, but more than enough survives to overcome the aware
reader.
Saramago’s audacity is triumphant in his Gospel (the short title that I
will employ). God, in Saramago’s Gospel, has some affinities to the J
Writer’s Yahweh and some to Blake’s Nobodaddy, but it is important to see
that Saramago resists giving us the Gnostics’ Ialdaboth. Kierkegaard in his
Concluding Unscientific Postscript ironically observed that “to give thinking
supremacy over everything else is gnosticism” (341). Yet Saramago’s God
scandalizes us in ways that transcend the intellect, since a God who is both
truth and time is the worst possible bad news. Saramago’s devil, delight-
fully named Pastor, is mildness itself compared to Saramago’s God, who
refuses Pastor’s attempt to be reconciled, and who manifests neither love
nor compassion for Jesus or for any other human being.
That must make the book seem sublimely outrageous, yet it is not, and
I think that only a bigot or a fool would judge Saramago’s Gospel to be blas-
phemous. Saramago’s God can be both wily and bland, and he has a capac-
ity for savage humor. No one is going to love this god, but then he does-
n’t ask or expect love. Worship and obedience are his requirements, and
sacred violence is his endless resource. Baruch Spinoza insisted that it was
necessary for us to love God without ever expecting that God would love
us in return. No one could love Saramago’s God, unless the lover were so
deep in sado-masochism as to be helpless before its drive.
Novelists and Novels 465

God tells us in the Gospel that he is dissatisfied with the small con-
stituency provided him by his chosen people, the Jews:

For the last four thousand and four years I have been the God of
the Jews, a quarrelsome and difficult race by nature, but on the
whole I have got along fairly well with them, they now take Me
seriously and are likely to go on doing so for the foreseeable
future. So, You are satisfied, said Jesus. I am and I am not, or
rather, I would be were it not for this restless heart of Mine, which
is forever telling Me, Well now, a fine destiny you’ve arranged
after four thousand years of trial and tribulation that no amount
of sacrifice on altars will ever be able to repay, for You continue to
be the god of a tiny population that occupies a minute part of this
world You created with everything that’s on it, so tell Me, My son,
if I should be satisfied with this depressing situation. Never hav-
ing created a world, I’m in no position to judge, replied Jesus.
True, you cannot judge, but you could help. Help in what way. To
spread My word, to help Me become the god of more people. I
don’t understand. If you play your part, that is to say, the part I
have reserved for you in My plan, I have every confidence that
within the next six centuries or so, despite all the struggles and
obstacles ahead of us, I will pass from being God of the Jews to
being God of those whom we will call Catholics, from the Greek.
And what is this part You have reserved for me in Your plan. That
of martyr, My son, that of victim, which is the best role of all for
propagating any faith and stirring up fervor. God made the words
martyr and victim seem like milk and honey on his tongue, but
Jesus felt a sudden chill in his limbs, as if the mist had closed over
him, while the devil regarded him with an enigmatic expression
which combined scientific curiosity with grudging compassion.
(311–12)

God is restless and does not wish to be depressed; those are his
motives for victimizing Jesus, and subsequently for torturing to death the
millions who will die as sacrifices to Jesus, whether they affirm him or deny
him. That God is the greatest of comedians we learn from his chant of the
martyrs: “a litany, in alphabetical order so as not to hurt any feelings about
precedence and importance” (321). The litany is quite marvelous, from
Adalbert of Prague, executed with a seven-pronged pikestaff, on to
“Wolgefortis or Livrade or Eutropia the bearded virgin crucified” (325).
Four long pages in length, the catalogue of sacred violence has such
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delights as Blandina of Lyons, gored by a savage bull, and the unfortunate


Januaris of Naples, first thrown to wild beasts, then into a furnace, and
finally decapitated. The gusto of Saramago’s God recalls Edward Gibbon’s
in Chapter XVI of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
except that Gibbon, maintaining decorum, avoids detailing the many vari-
eties of martyrdom by torture. But Gibbon again anticipates Saramago by
observing that Christians “have inflicted far greater severities on each
other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels” (452–53).
Saramago’s God, his voice a little tired, speaks of the Inquisition as a nec-
essary evil, and defends the burning of thousands because the cause of
Jesus demands it. One blinks at the dustjacket of the American edition of
Saramago’s Gospel, where we are assured that defying the authority of God
the Father “is still not denial of Him.”
Though necessarily a secondary character in comparison to
Saramago’s Jesus, God demands scrutiny beyond his menacingly comic
aspects. Primarily, the Gospel’s God is time, and not truth, the other
attribute he asserts. Saramago, a Marxist (an eccentric one), and not a
Christian, subverts St. Augustine on the theodicy of time. If time is God,
then God can be forgiven nothing, and who would desire to forgive him
anyway? But then, the Gospel’s God is not the least interested in for-
giveness: he forgives no one, not even Jesus, and he declines to forgive
Pastor, when the devil makes an honest offer of obedience. Power is
God’s only interest, and the sacrifice of Jesus employs the prospect of
forgiveness of our sins only as an advertisement. God makes clear that all
of us are guilty, and that he prefers to keep it that way. Jesus is no atone-
ment: his crucifixion is merely a device by which God ceases to be Jewish,
and becomes Catholic, a converso rather than a marrano. That is superb
irony, and Saramago makes it high art, though to thus reduce it critical-
ly is to invite a Catholic onslaught. Of all fictive representations of God
since the Yahwist’s, I vote for Saramago’s: he is at once the funniest and
the most chilling, in the mode of the Shakespearean hero-villains:
Richard III, Iago, Edmund in King Lear.

II

Pastor, or the devil, has his own charm, as befits a very original represen-
tation of Satan. A giant of a man, with a huge head, Pastor allows Jesus to
become his assistant shepherd for a large flock of sheep and goats. In
response to Jesus’ Pious exclamation—“The Lord alone is God”—the
non-Jewish Pastor replies with grand pungency:
Novelists and Novels 467

Certainly if God exists, He must be only one, but it would be bet-


ter if He were two, then there would be a god for the wolf and one
for the sheep, a god for the victim and one for the assassin, a god
for the condemned man and one for the executioner. (192–93)

This sensible dualism is not exactly Satanic, and Pastor remains con-
siderably more likeable than God throughout the novel. In the dialogues
between the devil and the younger Jesus, the devil’s part clearly prevails,
though honorably, unlike God’s dominance of Jesus when father and son
first meet in the desert. God demands a sheep dear to Jesus as a sacrifice,
and Jesus reluctantly assents. Pastor, on hearing of this, gives up on Jesus:
“You’ve learned nothing, begone with you” (222). And Pastor, so far, is
right: Jesus’ education as to God’s nature will be completed only upon the
cross.
What then are we to make of Pastor? Saramago’s devil is humane yet
scarcely a skeptic: he knows too much about God. If Saramago’s God is a
Portuguese converso, then Saramago’s devil was never Jewish, and seems
curiously unrelated both to God and to Jesus Christ. Why is Pastor in the
book? Evidently, only as a witness, I think one has to conclude. Saramago
seems to take us back to the unfallen Satan of the Book of Job, who goes
to-and-fro on the earth, and walks up and down on it. And yet Job’s Satan
was an Accuser; Pastor is not. Why does Jesus sojourn four years with
Pastor, as an apprentice shepherd? The angel, who comes belatedly to tell
Mary that Jesus is God’s son tells us that “the devil only denies himself ”
(263), which is extravagantly ambiguous, and could mean that Pastor
resists playing the role that God hag assigned him. Mary’s angel, after
telling us that Pastor was his schoolfellow, says that Pastor prospers
because “the harmony of the universe requires it” (264). There is then a
secret relationship between Pastor and God, a truth that dismays Jesus’
disciples (302).
When God, dressed like a wealthy Jew, appears to Jesus in the boat,
Saramago imagines a magnificent re-entry for Pastor:

The boat swayed, the swimmer’s head emerged from the water,
then his torso, splashing water everywhere, then his legs, a
leviathan rising from the depths, and it turned out to be Pastor,
reappearing after all these years. I’ve come to join you, he said,
settling himself on the side of the boat, equidistant between Jesus
and God, and yet oddly enough this time the boat did not tip to
his side, as if Pastor had no weight or he was levitating and not
really sitting, I’ve come to join you, he repeated, and hope I’m in
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time to take part in the conversation. We’ve been talking but still
haven’t got to the heart of the matter, replied God, and turning to
Jesus, He told him, This is the devil whom we have just been dis-
cussing. Jesus looked from one to the other, and saw that without
God’s beard they could have passed for twins, although the devil
was younger and less wrinkled. Jesus said, I know very well who
he is, I lived with him for four years when he was known as pas-
tor, and God replied, You had to live with someone, it couldn’t be
with Me, and you didn’t wish to be with your family, so that left
only the devil. Did he come looking for me or did You send him.
Neither one nor the other, let’s say we agreed that this was the
best solution. So that’s why, when he spoke through the possessed
man from Gadara, he called me Your son. Precisely. Which means
that both of you kept me in the dark. As happens to all humans.
But You said I was not human. And that is true, but you have been
what might technically be called incarnated. And now what do you
two want of me. I’m the one who wants something, not he. But
both of you are here, I noticed that Pastor’s appearance came as
no surprise, You must have been expecting him. Not exactly,
although in principle one should always expect the devil. But if the
matter You and I have to resolve affects only us, what is he doing
here and why don’t You send him away. One can dismiss the rab-
ble in the devil’s service if they become troublesome in word or
deed, but not Satan himself. Then he’s here because this conver-
sation concerns him too. My son, never forget what I’m about to
tell you, everything that concerns God also concerns the devil.
(309–10)

As God and the devil are twins (we have suspected this), it is a delight
to be told that we cannot live with God, and so must choose between our
families and the devil. God speaks of his desire to be God of the Catholics,
but this ambition I have glanced at already, and wish here only to ask: why
is Pastor in the boat? His expression combines “scientific curiosity with
grudging compassion” (312), but he is there because, as Jesus accurately
surmises, extending God’s domain also extends the devil’s. And yet poor
Pastor has his perplexities:

I’m staying, said Pastor, and these were the first words he spoke
since revealing his identity. I’m staying, he said a second time, and
added, I myself can see things in the future, but I’m not always
certain if what I see there is true or false, in other words, I can see
Novelists and Novels 469

my lies for what they are, that is, my truths, but I don’t know to
what extent the truths of others are their lies. (318)

Saramago dryly calls this a “torturous statement,” but he means that it


clearly indicts God, whose truths indeed are his lies. God’s account of the
Catholic Church that will be founded upon Jesus is true only insofar as it
is historically horrible, and the zest God manifests as he itemizes martyrs
and sums up the Inquisition has unmistakable sadistic overtones. Most
alarmingly, God (a good Augustinian, before Augustine) deprecates all
human joys as being false, since all of them emanate from original sin: “lust
and fear are weapons the demon uses to torment wretched mankind” (325).
When Jesus asks Pastor whether this is true, the devil’s reply is eloquently
illuminating:

More or less, I simply took what God didn’t want, the flesh with
all its joys and sorrows, youth and senility, bloom and decay, but it
isn’t true that fear is one of my weapons, I don’t recall having
invented sin and punishment or the terror they inspire. (325–26)

We tend to believe this when God snaps in response: “Be quiet ... sin
and the devil are one and the same thing.” Does it need God to say that?
Wouldn’t the Cardinal-Archbishop of Lisbon do as well? Saramago’s reply
is uncanny. God describes the Crusades, to be waged against the unnamed
Allah, whom Pastor disowns creating:

Who, then, will create this hostile god, asked Pastor. Jesus was at
a loss for an answer, and God, who had been silent, remained
silent, but a voice came down from the mist and said, Perhaps this
god and the one to come are the same god. Jesus, God, and the
devil pretended not to hear but could not help looking at one
another in alarm, mutual fear is like that, it readily unites enemies.
(328–29)

Only here, in Saramago’s Gospel, do we hear a voice beyond God’s.


Whose is it? Who could proclaim what God does not wish to say, which is
that he and Allah are one? With a God as sly and unlovable as Saramago’s,
both we and Saramago long for a God beyond God, perhaps the Alien or
Stranger God of the Gnostics. But whoever that God is, he does not speak
again in this novel. Very deftly, Saramago has just told us explicitly what he
tells us implicitly throughout: God and Jesus pragmatically are enemies,
even as Pastor is the unwilling enemy of both. Yet in what does that enmity
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consist? Reacting to God’s account of the Inquisition, Pastor remarks:


“One has to be God to countenance so much blood” (330).
Pastor’s great moment—and it is one of the handful of key passages in
the book—comes in his vain attempt at reconciliation with God:

Pastor searched for the right words before explaining, I’ve been
listening to all that has been said here in this boat, and although
I myself have caught glimpses of the light and darkness ahead, I
never realized the light came from the burning stakes and the
darkness from great piles of bodies. Does this trouble you. It
shouldn’t trouble me, for I am the devil, and the devil profits
from death even more than You do, it goes without saying that
hell is more crowded than heaven. Then why do you complain.
I’m not complaining, I’m making a proposal. Go ahead, but be
quick, I cannot loiter here for all eternity. No one knows better
than You that the devil too has a heart. Yes, but you make poor
use of it. Today I use it by acknowledging Your power and wish-
ing that it spread to the ends of the earth without the need of so
much death, and since You insist that whatever thwarts and
denies You comes from the evil I represent and govern in this
world, I propose that You receive me into Your heavenly king-
dom, my past offenses redeemed by those I will not commit in
future, that You accept my obedience as in those happy days
when I was one of Your chosen angels, Lucifer You called me,
bearer of light, before my ambition to become Your equal con-
sumed my soul and made me rebel against You. And would you
care to tell Me why I should pardon you and receive you into My
Kingdom. Because if You grant me that same pardon You will
one day promise left and right, then evil will cease, Your son will
not have to die, and Your kingdom will extend beyond the land
of the Hebrews to embrace the whole globe, good will prevail
everywhere, and I shall stand among the lowliest of the angels
who have remained faithful, more faithful than all of them now
that I have repented, and I shall sing Your praises, everything
will end as if it had never been, everything will become what it
should always have been. (330–31)

The irony of the humane Pastor and the inhumane God could not be
better juxtaposed. God makes clear that he would prefer an even worse
devil, if that were possible, and that without the devil, God cannot be God.
Pastor, who has been persuasively sincere, shrugs and goes off, after
Novelists and Novels 471

collecting from Jesus the old black bowl from Nazareth into which the
blood of Jesus will drip in the novel’s closing words.
It is not sufficient to praise Saramago’s originality in limning his whol-
ly undiabolic devil. One must go further. The enigmatic Pastor is the only
devil who could be aesthetically and intellectually appropriate as we con-
clude the Second Millennium. Except that he cannot be crucified, this fall-
en angel has far more in common with Saramago’s Jesus than with
Saramago’s God. They both are God’s victims, suffering the tyranny of
time, which God calls truth. Pastor is resigned, and less rebellious than
Jesus, yet that is because Pastor knows all there is to know. As readers, we
remain more akin to Saramago’s uncanny devil than we are to his malevo-
lent ironist of a God.

III

The glory of Saramago’s Gospel is Saramago’s Jesus, who seems to me


humanly and aesthetically more admirable than any other version of Jesus
in the literature of the century now ending. Perhaps D.H. Lawrence’s The
Man Who Died is a near-rival, but Lawrence’s Jesus is a grand Lawrencian
vitalist, rather than a possible human being. Saramago’s Jesus paradoxical-
ly is the novelist’s warmest and most memorable character of any of his
books. W.H. Auden, Christian poet-critic, oddly found in Shakespeare’s
Falstaff a type of Christ. I cite a paragraph of Auden to emphasize how far
both Saramago’s God and Saramago’s Jesus are from even a generous,
undogmatic Christian view:

The Christian God is not a self-sufficient being like Aristotle’s


First Cause, but a God who creates a world which he continues to
love although it refuses to love him in return. He appears in this
world, not as Apollo or Aphrodite might appear, disguised as man
so that no mortal should recognize his divinity, but as a real man
who openly claims to be God. And the consequence is inevitable.
The highest religious and temporal authorities condemn Him as
a blasphemer and a Lord of Misrule, as a bad Companion for
mankind. Inevitable because, as Richelieu said, “The salvation of
State is in this world,” and history has not as yet provided us with
any evidence that the Prince of this world has changed his charac-
ter. (207–08)

Saramago’s God, as I have said, neither loves the world nor does he
expect it to love him in return. He wishes power, as widely extended as
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possible. And Saramago’s Jesus is anything but an appearance of God “dis-


guised as man”; rather his Jesus has been shanghaied by God, for God’s
own purposes of power. As for Satan, “the Prince of this world,” we know
that Saramago has changed his character.
The title of the novel is The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, where
“according” matters most. Saramago’s Jesus is an ironist, an amazingly
mild one considering his victimization by God. Before meeting John the
Baptist, Jesus is told that John is taller, heavier, more bearded, is hardly
clothed, and subsists on locust and wild honey. “He sounds more like the
Messiah than I do, Jesus said, rising from the circle” (354).
Saramago’s novel begins and ends with the Crucifixion, presented at the
start with considerable irony, but at the close with a terrible pathos:

Jesus is dying slowly, life ebbing from him, ebbing, when sudden-
ly the heavens overhead open wide and God appears in the same
attire He wore in the boat, and His words resound throughout the
earth, This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus
realized then that he had been tricked, as the lamb led to sacrifice
is tricked, and that his life had been planned for death from the
very beginning. Remembering the river of blood and suffering
that would flow from his side and flood the globe, he called out to
the open sky, where God could be seen smiling, Men, forgive
Him, for He knows nor what He has done. Then he began expir-
ing in the midst of a dream. He found himself back in Nazareth
and saw his father shrugging his shoulders and smiling as he told
him, just as I cannot ask you all the questions, neither can you give
me all the answers. There was still some life in him when he felt a
sponge soaked in water and vinegar moisten his lips, and looking
down, he saw a man walking away with a bucket, a staff over his
shoulder. But what Jesus did not see, on the ground, was the black
bowl into which his blood was dripping. (376–77)

“Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done” testifies
both to Jesus’ sweetness and to Saramago’s aesthetically controlled fury. No
disinterested reader, free of ideology and of creed, is going to forgive
Saramago’s God for the murder of Jesus and the subsequent torrents of
human blood that will result. Joyce’s Stephen speaks of the “hangman
God,” as some Italians still call him, and that precisely is Saramago’s God.
This would be appalling enough in itself but is augmented by the long and
loving portrait that Saramago gives of his Jesus.
The story of this Jesus begins and ends with an earthenware bowl, first
Novelists and Novels 473

presented to Mary the mother of Jesus by a beggar, an apparent angel.


That bowl overflows with luminous earth, presumably unfallen; at the
close it catches the blood of the dying Jesus. The beggar is God, rather
than Pastor, and appears again to Mary in a dream-vision that is also a
tryst. When Jesus is born, God manifests again as the third of three pass-
ing shepherds, bringing bread of an occult kind. One supposes that this is
subtly akin to God’s seed resulting in the flesh of Jesus, but so nuanced is
Saramago that supposition sometimes needs to be evaded, in this mysteri-
ous book.
The thirteen-year-old Jesus leaves home because the Romans have
crucified his father Joseph, an invention entirely Saramago’s own, just as
Joseph’s partial complicity in Herod’s massacre of the innocents is also
Saramago’s rather startling suggestion, and is another trouble for Jesus that
sends him forth on his road. But why does Saramago so alter the story?
Perhaps this most humane of all versions of Jesus has to suffer the darkness
of two fathers, the loving, unlucky, and guilty Joseph, and the unloving,
fortunate, and even guiltier God.
When the boy Jesus disputes with the doctors of the Law in the
Temple, I am reminded again of how Augustinian Saramago has made both
God and the Law. One doesn’t quarrel with this anachronism, because
Saramago’s God is himself so anxious to forsake Judahism (to call it that)
for Catholicism. And besides, one grants Saramago his anachronisms in
this marvelous book just as one grants them endlessly to Shakespeare. Still,
guilt is not a concern of the only traditional Jesus who moves me, the
Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas. Yet I am a Jewish Gnostic expli-
cating a beautiful book by a Portuguese who is no Catholic, anymore than
Fernando Pessoa was. At just this point in his narrative, Saramago brings
Jesus and Pastor together, and that curious sojourn I have examined
already.
And yet Jesus’ principal relationship in his life, as Saramago sees it and
tells it, is to neither of his fathers, nor to the devil, nor to Mary his moth-
er, but to the whore Mary Magdalene. Of all the splendors of Saramago’s
Gospel, the love between Jesus and the Magdalene is the grandest, and
their meeting and union (231–43) is for me the summit of Saramago’s
achievement, up to the present time. Echoing the Song of Songs,
Saramago is most the artist when he intertwines a reply to Pastor with
Jesus’ awakening to sexual life:

Jesus breathed so fast, for one moment he thought he would faint


when her hands, the left hand on his forehead, the right hand on
his ankles, began caressing him, slowly coming together, meeting
474 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

in the middle, then starting all over again. You’ve learned nothing,
begone with you, Pastor had told him, and who knows, perhaps he
meant to say that Jesus had not learned to cherish life. Now Mary
Magdalene instructed him.... (236)

We can void the “perhaps,” and Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ best teacher,
eclipsing Joseph, God, Pastor, and Mary the mother. In what may be the
book’s greatest irony she teaches him freedom, which God will not permit
any man, but in particular not to God’s only son.
I myself have just turned seventy, and ask more urgently than before:
where shall wisdom be found? The wisdom of Saramago’s Gospel is very
harsh: we can emulate Jesus only by forgiving God, but we do not believe,
with Jesus, that God does not know what God has done.
I find the epilogue to Saramago’s Gospel not in Blindness, a parable as
dark as any could be, but in the charming The Tale of the Unknown Island, a
brief fable composed in 1998, the year of his Nobel Prize, and translated a
year later by Margaret Jull Costa. In the wonderful comic vein of The Siege
of Lisbon, Saramago’s tale begins with a man asking a king for a boat which
can sail in quest of the unknown island. The boat granted, the man goes
off to the harbor, followed by the king’s cleaning woman, who will consti-
tute the rest of the crew.
The cleaning woman, with superb resolution, vows that she and the
man will be sufficient to sail the caravel to the unknown island, thus heart-
ening the man, whose will cannot match hers. They go to bed in separate
bunks, port and starboard, and he dreams bad dreams, until he finds her
shadow beside his shadow:

He woke up with his arms about the cleaning woman, and her
arms about him, their bodies and their bunks fused into one, so
that no one can tell any more if this is port or starboard. Then, as
soon as the sun had risen, the man and the woman went to paint
in white letters on both sides of the prow the name that the car-
avel still lacked. Around midday, with the tide, The Unknown
Island finally set to sea, in search of itself. (51)

Saramago names no one: I am critically outrageous enough to venture


upon some experimental namings, as an antithesis to Saramago’s Gospel.
Let us call the man Jesus Christ, try the cleaning woman as Mary
Magdalene, and the king, who exists to receive favors, will do for God.
Doubtless, Saramago would shake his head, but so audacious a narrative
genius inspires audacity in his critic. No one will be crucified upon the
Novelists and Novels 475

masts of the Unknown Island, and the bad dreams of this Jesus will not be
realized. Saramago’s happy tale is a momentary antidote to the most trag-
ic of his works. Beware a God who is at once truth and time, Saramago
warns us, and abandon such a God to sail out in search of yourself.

Works Cited

Auden, W.H. “The Prince’s Dog.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New
York: Random House, 1962. 182–208.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Vol. 1. New York Heritage Press, 1946.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical
Fragments. Vol. l. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
Saramago, José. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Trans. Giovanni
Pontiero. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
———. The Tale of the Unknown Island. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.
N O V E L S
A N D

Norman Mailer
N O V E L I S T S

(1923–)

Ancient Evenings

MAILER IS THE MOST VISIBLE OF CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS, JUST AS


Thomas Pynchon is surely the most invisible. As the inheritor of the not
exactly unfulfilled journalistic renown of Hemingway, Mailer courts dan-
ger, disaster, even scandal. Thinking of Mailer, Pynchon, and Doctorow
among others, Geoffrey Hartman remarks that:

The prose of our best novelists is as fast, embracing, and abrasive


as John Donne’s Sermons. It is polyphonic despite or within its
monologue, its confessional stream of words....
Think of Mailer, who always puts himself on the line, sparring,
taunting, as macho as Hemingway but deliberately renouncing
taciturnity. Mailer places himself too near events, as science fiction
or other forms of romance place themselves too far....

Elizabeth Hardwick, a touch less generous than the theoretical


Hartman, turns Gertrude Stein against Mailer’s oral polyphony:

We have here a “literature” of remarks, a fast-moving confound-


ing of Gertrude Stein’s confident assertion that “remarks are not
literature.” Sometimes remarks are called a novel, sometimes a
biography, sometimes history.

Hardwick’s Mailer is “a spectacular mound of images” or “anecdotal


pile.” He lacks only an achieved work, in her view, and therefore is a delight
to biographers, who resent finished work as a “sharp intrusion,” beyond

476
Novelists and Novels 477

their ken. Her observations have their justice, yet the phenomenon is older
than Mailer, or even Hemingway. The truly spectacular mound of images
and anecdotal pile was George Gordon, Lord Byron, but he wrote Don
Juan, considered by Shelley to be the great poem of the age. Yet even Don
Juan is curiously less than Byron was, or seemed, or still seems. Mailer
hardly purports to be the Byron of our day (the Hemingway will do), but
he might fall back upon Byron as an earlier instance of the literary use of
celebrity, or of the mastery of polyphonic remarks.
Is Mailer a novelist? His best book almost certainly is The Executioner’s
Song, which Ms. Hardwick calls “the apotheosis of our flowering ‘oral lit-
erature’—thus far,” a triumph of the tape recorder. My judgment of its
strength may be much too fast, as Ms. Hardwick warms, and yet I would
not call The Executioner’s Song a novel. Ancient Evenings rather crazily is a
novel, Mailer’s Salammbô as it were, but clearly more engrossing as vision-
ary speculation than as narrative or as the representation of moral charac-
ter. Richard Poirier, Mailer’s best critic, prefers An American Dream and
Why Are We In Vietnam?, neither of which I can reread with aesthetic
pleasure. Clearly, Mailer is a problematical writer; he has written no indis-
putable book, nothing on the order of The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby,
Miss Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49, let alone As I Lay Dying, The Sound
and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! His formidable literary
energies have not found their inevitable mode. When I think of him,
Advertisements for Myself comes into my memory more readily than any
other work, perhaps because truly he is his own supreme fiction. He is the
author of “Norman Mailer,” a lengthy, discontinuous, and perhaps canon-
ical fiction.

II

Advertisements for Myself (1960) sums up Mailer’s ambitions and


accomplishments through the age of thirty-six. After a quarter-century, I
have just reread it, with an inevitable mixture of pleasure and a little sad-
ness. Unquestionably, Mailer has not fulfilled its many complex promises,
and yet the book is much more than a miscellany. If not exactly a “Song of
Myself,” nevertheless Advertisements remains Mailer at his most
Whitmanian, as when he celebrates his novel-in-progress:

If it is to have any effect, and I can hardly look forward to exhaust-


ing the next ten years without hope of a deep explosion of effect,
the book will be fired to its fuse by the rumor that once I pointed
to the farthest fence and said that within ten years I would try to
478 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

hit the longest ball ever to go up into the accelerated hurricane air
of our American letters. For if I have one ambition above all oth-
ers, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and
Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even
old moldering Hemingway might have come to read, for it would
carry what they had to tell another part of the way.

Hemingway in 1959 reached the age of sixty, but was neither old nor
moldering. He was to kill himself on July 2, 1961, but Mailer could hard-
ly have anticipated that tragic release. In a letter to George Plimpton
(January 17, 1961) Hemingway characterized Advertisements for Myself as
the sort of ragtag assembly of his rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings
shot through with occasional brilliance.” As precursor, Hemingway would
have recognized Mailer’s vision of himself as Babe Ruth, hitting out farther
than Stendhal, Tolstoy, et al., except that the agonistic trope in the master
is more agile than in the disciple, because ironized:

Am a man without any ambition, except to be champion of the


world, I wouldn’t fight Dr. Tolstoy in a 20 round bout because I
know he would knock my ears off. The Dr. had terrific wind and
could go on forever and then some....
But these Brooklyn jerks are so ignorant that they start off
fighting Mr. Tolstoy. And they announce they have beaten him
before the fight starts.

That is from a letter to Charles Scribner (September 6–7, 1949), and


“these Brooklyn jerks” indubitably refers to the highly singular author of The
Naked and the Dead (1948), who had proclaimed his victory over Hemingway
as a tune-up for the Tolstoy match. Hemingway’s irony, directed as much
towards himself as against Mailer, shrewdly indicates Mailer’s prime aesthet-
ic flaw: a virtually total absence of irony. Irony may or may not be what the
late Paul de Man called it, “the condition of literary language itself,” but
Mailer certainly could use a healthy injection of it. If Thomas Mann is at one
extreme—the modern too abounding in irony—then Mailer clearly hugs the
opposite pole. The point against Mailer is made best by Max Apple in his
splendid boxing tale, “Inside Norman Mailer” (The Oranging of America,
1976), where Mailer is handled with loving irony, and Hemingway’s trope
touches its ultimate limits as Apple challenges Mailer in the ring:

“Concentrate,” says Mailer, “so the experience will not be wasted


on you.
Novelists and Novels 479

“It’s hard,” I say, “amid the color and distraction.”


“I know,” says my gentle master, “but think about one big
thing.”
I concentrate on the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
It works. My mind is less a palimpsest, more a blank page.
“You may be too young to remember,” he says, “James Jones
and James T. Farrell and James Gould Cozzens and dozens like
them. I took them all on, absorbed all they had and went on my
way, just like Shakespeare ate up Tottel’s Miscellany.”

There are no such passages in Mailer himself. One cannot require a


novelist to cultivate irony, but its absolute absence causes difficulties, par-
ticularly when the writer is a passionate and heterodox moralist. Mailer’s
speculations upon time, sex, death, cancer, digestion, courage, and God are
all properly notorious, and probably will not earn him a place as one of the
major sages. The strongest aesthetic defense of Mailer as speculator
belongs to Richard Poirier, in his book of 1972:

Mailer insists on living at the divide, living on the divide, between


the world of recorded reality and a world of omens, spirits, and
powers, only that his presence there may blur the distinction. He
seals and obliterates the gap he finds, like a sacrificial warrior or,
as he would probably prefer, like a Christ who brings not peace
but a sword, not forgiveness for past sins but an example of the
pains necessary to secure a future.

This has force and some persuasiveness, but Poirier is too good a crit-
ic not to add the shadow side of Mailer’s “willingness not to foreclose on
his material in the interests of merely formal resolutions.” Can there be
any resolutions then for his books? Poirier goes on to say that: “There is
no satisfactory form for his imagination when it is most alive. There are
only exercises for it.” But this appears to imply that Mailer cannot shape
his fictions, since without a sacrifice of possibility upon the altar of form,
narrative becomes incoherent, frequently through redundance (as in
Ancient Evenings). Mailer’s alternative has been to forsake Hemingway for
Dreiser, as in the exhaustive narrative of The Executioner’s Song. In either
mode, finally, we are confronted by the paradox that Mailer’s importance
seems to transcend any of his individual works. The power of The
Executioner’s Song finally is that of “reality in America,” to appropriate
Lionel Trilling’s phrase for Dreiser’s appropriation of the material of An
American Tragedy. Are we also justified in saying that An American Dream
480 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

essentially is Mailer’s comic-strip appropriation of what might be called


“irreality in America”? Evidently there will never be a mature book by
Mailer that is not problematical in its form. To Poirier, this is Mailer’s
strength. Poirier’s generous overpraise of An American Dream and Why
Are We In Vietnam? perhaps can be justified by Mailer’s peculiarly
American aesthetic, which has its Emersonian affinities. Mailer’s too is an
aesthetic of use, a pragmatic application of the American difference from
the European past. The Armies of the Night (1968), rightly praised by
Poirier, may seem someday Mailer’s best and most permanent book. It is
certainly not only a very American book, but today is one of the handful
of works that vividly represent an already lost and legendary time, the era
of the so-called Counterculture that surged up in the later 1960’s, largely
in protest against our war in Vietnam. Mailer, more than any other figure,
has broken down the distinction between fiction and journalism. This
sometimes is praised in itself. I judge it an aesthetic misfortune, in every-
one else, but on Mailer himself I tend to reserve judgment, since the mode
now seems his own.

III

Mailer’s validity as a cultural critic is always qualified by his own


immersion in what he censures. Well known for being well known, he is
himself inevitably part of what he deplores. As a representation, he at least
rivals all of his fictive creations. Ancient Evenings, his most inventive and
exuberant work, is essentially a self-portrait of the author as ancient
Egyptian magician, courtier, lover and anachronistic speculator. Despite
Poirier’s eloquent insistences, the book leaves Mailer as he was judged to
be by Poirier in 1972, “like Melville without Moby Dick, George Eliot
without Middlemarch, Mark Twain without Huckleberry Finn.” Indeed, the
book is Mailer’s Pierre, his Romola, his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court. At sixty-two, Mailer remains the author of Advertisements for Myself,
The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song.
Is he then a superb accident of personality, wholly adequate to the
spirit of the age? Though a rather bad critic of novelists, he is one of the
better critics of Norman Mailer. His one critical blindness, in regard to
himself, involves the destructive nature of Hemingway’s influence upon
him. Hemingway was a superb storyteller and an uncanny prose poet;
Mailer is neither. Essentially, Mailer is a phantasmagoric visionary who
was found by the wrong literary father, Hemingway. Hemingway’s verbal
economy is not possible for Mailer. There are profound affinities between
Hemingway and Wallace Stevens, but none between Mailer and the best
Novelists and Novels 481

poetry of his age. This is the curious sadness with which the “First
Advertisements for Myself ” reverberates after twenty-five years:

So, mark you. Every American writer who takes himself to be both
major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows
from the self-love of a Hemingway style ...
For you see I have come to have a great sympathy for the
Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of
this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is
Ernest H.

By taking on Hemingway, Mailer condemned himself to a similar


agon, which harmed Hemingway, except in The Sun Also Rises and in The
First Forty-Nine Stories. It has more than harmed Mailer’s work. The Deer
Park defies rereading, and An American Dream and Why Are We In
Vietnam? have now lost the immediacy of their occasions, and are scarcely
less unreadable. In what now is the Age of Pynchon, Mailer has been
eclipsed as a writer of fictions, though hardly at all as a performing self. He
may be remembered more as a prose prophet than as a novelist, more as
Carlyle than as Hemingway. There are worse literary fates. Carlyle, long
neglected, doubtless will return. Mailer, now celebrated, doubtless will
vanish into neglect, and yet always will return, as a historian of the moral
consciousness of his era, and as the representative writer of his generation.
N O V E L S
A N D

James Baldwin
N O V E L I S T S

(1924–1987)

WHATEVER THE ULTIMATE CANONICAL JUDGMENT UPON JAMES BALDWIN’S


fiction may prove to be, his nonfictional work clearly has permanent status
in American literature. Baldwin seems to me the most considerable moral
essayist now writing in the United States, and is comparable to George
Orwell as a prose Protestant in stance. The evangelical heritage never has
abandoned the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Baldwin, like so
many American essayists since Emerson, possesses the fervor of a preach-
er. Unlike Emerson, Baldwin lacks the luxury of detachment, since he
speaks, not for a displaced Yankee majority, but for a sexual minority with-
in a racial minority, indeed for an aesthetic minority among black homo-
sexuals.
Ultimately, Baldwin’s dilemma as a writer compelled to address social
torments and injustices is that he is a minority of one, a solitary voice
breaking forth against himself (and all others) from within himself. Like
Carlyle (and a single aspect of the perspectivizing Nietzsche), Baldwin is of
the authentic lineage of Jeremiah, most inward of prophets. What Baldwin
opposes is what might be called, in Jeremiah’s language, the injustice of
outwardness, which means that Baldwin always must protest, even in the
rather unlikely event that his country ever were to turn from selfishness and
cruelty to justice and compassion in confronting its underclass of the
exploited poor, whether blacks, Hispanics, or others cast out by the Reagan
Revolution.
It seems accurate to observe that we remember Jeremiah, unlike Amos
or Micah, for his individuation of his own suffering, rather than for his
social vision, such as it was. Baldwin might prefer to have been an Amos or

482
Novelists and Novels 483

a Micah, forerunners of Isaiah, rather than a Jeremiah, but like Jeremiah


he is vivid as a rhetorician of his own psychic anguish and perplexities, and
most memorable as a visionary of a certain involuntary isolation, an elec-
tion that requires a dreadful cost of confirmation. As Baldwin puts it, the
price of the ticket is to accept the real reasons for the human journey:

The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become
white—: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was
to insist, nothing less. This incredibly limited not to say dimwit-
ted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and
this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted
the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ances-
tors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ances-
tors of the people who became white and who require of my cap-
tivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my cap-
tivity than to justify their own.

The Biblical text that Baldwin alludes to here, Psalm 137, does begin
with the song of the exiles from Zion (“and they that wasted us required of
us mirth”) but ends with a ferocious prophecy against the wasters, our-
selves. No writer—black or white—warns us so urgently of “the fire next
time” as Baldwin and Jeremiah do, but I hear always in both prophets the
terrible pathos of origins:

Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,


Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou
camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained
thee a prophet unto the nations.
Then said I, Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a
child.
We: my family, the living and the dead, and the children com-
ing along behind us. This was a complex matter, for I was not liv-
ing with my family in Harlem, after all, but “down-town,” in the
“white world,” in alien and mainly hostile territory. On the other
hand, for me, then, Harlem was almost as alien and in a yet more
intimidating way and risked being equally hostile, although for very
different reasons. This truth cost me something in guilt and confu-
sion, but it was the truth. It had something to do with my being the
son of an evangelist and having been a child evangelist, but this is
not all there was to it—that is, guilt is not all there was to it.
The fact that this particular child had been born when and
484 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

where he was born had dictated certain expectations. The child


does not really know what these expectations are—does not know
how real they are—until he begins to fail, challenge, or defeat
them. When it was clear, for example, that the pulpit, where I had
made so promising a beginning, would not be my career, it was
hoped that I would go on to college. This was never a very realis-
tic hope and—perhaps because I knew this—I don’t seem to have
felt very strongly about it. In any case, this hope was dashed by the
death of my father.
Once I had left the pulpit, I had abandoned or betrayed my role
in the community—indeed, my departure from the pulpit and my
leaving home were almost simultaneous. (I had abandoned the
ministry in order not to betray myself by betraying the ministry.)

Reluctant prophets are in the position of Jonah; they provide texts for
the Day of Atonement. Baldwin is always at work reexamining everything,
doing his first works over; as he says: “Sing or shout or testify or keep it to
yourself: but know whence you came.” We came crying hither because we
came to this great stage of fools, but Baldwin, like Jeremiah and unlike
Shakespeare, demands a theology of origins. He finds it in self-hatred,
which he rightly insists is universal, though he seems to reject or just not
be interested in the Freudian account of our moral masochism, our need
for punishment. The evangelical sense of conscious sin remains strong in
Baldwin. Yet, as a moral essayist, he is post-Christian, and persuades us
that his prophetic stance is not so much religious as aesthetic. A kind of
aesthetic of the moral life governs his vision, even in the turbulence of The
Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street, and helps make them his finest
achievements so far.

The Fire Next Time

The center of Baldwin’s prophecy can be located in one long, powerful


paragraph of The Fire Next Time:

“The white man’s Heaven,” sings a Black Muslim minister, “is the
black man’s Hell.” One may object—possibly—that this puts the
matter somewhat too simply, but the song is true, and it has been
true for as long as white men have ruled the world. The Africans put
it another way: When the white man came to Africa, the white man
had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white
man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land,
Novelists and Novels 485

and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the


Bible. The struggle, therefore, that now begins in the world is
extremely complex, involving the historical role of Christianity in
the realm of power—that is, politics—and in the realm of morals.
In the realm of power, Christianity has operated with an unmitigat-
ed arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily
imposes on those who have discovered the true faith, the spiritual
duty of liberating the infidels. This particular true faith, moreover,
is more deeply concerned about the soul than it is about the body,
to which fact the flesh (and the corpses) of countless infidels bears
witness. It goes without saying, then, that whoever questions the
authority of the true faith also contests the right of the nations that
hold this faith to rule over him—contests, in short, their title to his
land. The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the
integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an
absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag.
Priests and nuns and schoolteachers helped to protect and sanctify
the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were
indeed seeking a city, but not one in the heavens, and one to be
made, very definitely, by captive hands. The Christian church
itself—again, as distinguished from some of its ministers—sancti-
fied and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it
did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting rela-
tive well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor
of God. God had come a long way from the desert—but then so had
Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north, and
rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of
power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become—for all prac-
tical purposes, anyway—black. Thus, in the realm of morals the role
of Christianity has been, at best, ambivalent. Even leaving out of
account the remarkable arrogance that assumed that the ways and
morals of others were inferior to those of Christians, and that they
therefore had every right, and could use any means, to change
them, the collision between cultures—and the schizophrenia in the
mind of Christendom—had rendered the domain of morals as
chartless as the sea once was, and as treacherous as the sea still is. It
is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral
human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I
think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself
from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian
church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only
486 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this,


then it is time we got rid of Him.

This superb instance of Baldwin’s stance and style as a moral essayist


depends for its rhetorical power upon a judicious blend of excess and
restraint. Its crucial sentence achieves prophetic authority:

It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly


moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is pos-
sible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce
himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the
Christian church.

The parenthesis, nobly skeptical, is the trope of a master rhetorician,


and placing “believe” in italics nicely puts into question the problemat-
ics of faith. “Divorce,” denounced by St. Paul as having been introduced
because of our hardness of hearts, acquires the antithetical aura of the
Church itself, while Christian prohibitions are assimilated (rather
wickedly) to Christian crimes and hypocrisies. This is, rhetorically con-
sidered, good, unclean fun, but the burden is savage, and steeped in
moral high seriousness. The strength of The Fire Next Time comes to
rest in its final paragraph, with the interplay between two italicized
rhetorical questions, an interplay kindled when “then” is added to the
second question:

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those
wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered,
What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am
aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are
very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the
baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or
Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was
achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then? I could also see
that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might
make that vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that does not really
depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organ-
ization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army:
historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that
we recognize when we say, “Whatever goes up must come down.”
And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest,
most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has
Novelists and Novels 487

ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we


have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the rel-
atively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who
must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the oth-
ers—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that
we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and
change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything,
the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song
by a slave, is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more
water, the fire next time!”

The shrewd rhetorical movement here is from the waterwheel to the


ambivalent divine promise of no second flood, the promise of covenant
with its dialectical countersong of the conflagration ensuing from our vio-
lation of covenant. That vision of impending fire re-illuminates the
poignant question: “What will happen to all that beauty then?” All that beau-
ty that is in jeopardy transcends even the beauty of black people, and
extends to everything human, and to bird, beast, and flower.
No Name in the Street takes its fierce title from Job 18:16–19, where it
is spoken to Job by Bildad the Shuhite, concerning the fate of the wicked:

His roots shall be dried up beneath, and above shall his branch
be cut off.
His remembrance shall perish from the earth, and he shall have
no name in the street.
He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of
the world.
He shall neither have son nor nephew among his people, nor
any remaining in his dwellings.
They that come after him shall be astonished at his day, as they
that went before were affrighted.

I have to admit, having just read (and re-read) my way through the 690
pages of The Price of the Ticket, that frequently I am tempted to reply to
Baldwin with Job’s response to Bildad:

How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with


words?
These ten times have ye reproached me: ye are not ashamed
that ye make yourselves strange to me. And be it indeed that I
have erred, mine error remaineth with myself.
488 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

If indeed ye will magnify yourselves against me, and plead


against me my reproach.

Baldwin’s rhetorical authority as prophet would be seriously impaired


if he were merely a job’s comforter, Bildad rather than Jeremiah. No Name
in the Street cunningly evades the risk that Baldwin will magnify himself
against the reader, partly by the book’s adroitness at stationing the author
himself in the vulnerable contexts of his own existence, both in New York
and in Paris. By not allowing himself (or his readers) to forget how per-
petually a black homosexual aesthete and moralist, writer and preacher,
must fight for his life, Baldwin earns the pathos of the prophetic predica-
ment:

I made such motions as I could to understand what was happen-


ing, and to keep myself afloat. But I had been away too long. It
was not only that I could not readjust myself to life in New
York—it was also that I would not: I was never going to be any-
body’s nigger again. But I was now to discover that the world has
more than one way of keeping you a nigger, has evolved more
than one way of skinning the cat; if the hand slips here, it tight-
ens there, and now I was offered, gracefully indeed: membership
in the club. I had lunch at some elegant bistros, dinner at some
exclusive clubs. I tried to be understanding about my country-
men’s concern for difficult me, and unruly mine—and I really was
trying to be understanding, though not without some bewilder-
ment, and, eventually, some malice. I began to be profoundly
uncomfortable. It was a strange kind of discomfort, a terrified
apprehension that I had lost my bearings. I did not altogether
understand what I was hearing. I did not trust what I heard
myself saying. In very little that I heard did I hear anything that
reflected anything which I knew, or had endured, of life. My
mother and my father, my brothers and my sisters were not pres-
ent at the tables at which I sat down, and no one in the company
had ever heard of them. My own beginnings, or instincts, began
to shift as nervously as the cigarette smoke that wavered around
my head. I was not trying to hold on to my wretchedness. On the
contrary, if my poverty was coming, at last, to an end, so much
the better, and it wasn’t happening a moment too soon—and yet,
I felt an increasing chill, as though the rest of my life would have
to be lived in silence.
Novelists and Novels 489

The discomfort of having lost bearings is itself a prophetic trope, and


comes to its fruition in the book’s searing final paragraph:

To be an Afro-American, or an American black, is to be in the sit-


uation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found
themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise hon-
orably defend—which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to
attack and condemn—and who yet spoke out of the most passion-
ate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable
and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization help-
lessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it. A per-
son does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much
rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and
detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the
people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is ter-
rible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their
own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about
America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above
the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come.

Not to be at home among one’s compatriots is to avoid the catastro-


phe of being at ease in the new Zion that is America. A reader, however
moved by Baldwin’s rhetorical authority, can be disturbed here by the
implication that all blacks are prophets, at least in our society. Would to
God indeed that all the Lord’s people were prophets, but they are not, and
cannot be. Fourteen years after the original publication of No Name in the
Street, I am confronted by polls indicating that the President of the United
States, currently enjoying a sixty-eight percent approval rating among all
his constituents, also possesses a rather surprising fifty percent endorse-
ment from my black fellow citizens. Whatever the President’s place in his-
tory may prove to be, time has darkened Baldwin’s temporal prophecy that
his own people could remain an undivided witness against our civilization.

The Price of the Ticket

Like every true prophet, Baldwin passionately would prefer the fate of
Jonah to that of Jeremiah, but I do not doubt that his authentic descent
from Jeremiah will continue to be valid until the end of his life (and mine).
The final utterance in The Price of the Ticket seems to me Baldwin’s most
poignant, ever:
490 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the
main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to
echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.
Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks—though we are
rarely what we appear to be. We are, for the most part, visibly
male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment.
But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of
a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of
us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female,
female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of
each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact
exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I.
But none of us can do anything about it.

Baldwin is most prophetic, and most persuasive, when his voice is as


subdued as it is here. What gives the rhetorical effect of self-subdual is the
precise use of plural pronouns throughout. Moving from his own predica-
ment to the universal, the prophet achieves an effect directly counter to
Jeremiah’s pervasive trope of individualizing the prophetic alternative. The
ultimate tribute that Baldwin has earned is his authentic share in Jeremiah’s
most terrible utterance:

O Lord, thou has deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art
stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every
one mocketh me.
For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil; because
the word of the Lord was made a reproach unto me, and a deri-
sion, daily.
Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any
more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire
shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could
not stay,
N O V E L I S T S
Flannery O’Connor

A N D
(1925–1964)

N O V E L S
The Violent Bear It Away

A PROFESSEDLY ROMAN CATHOLIC PROSE ROMANCE BEGINS WITH THE


death of an eighty-four-year-old Southern American Protestant, self-called
prophet, and professional moonshiner, as set forth in this splendidly com-
prehensive sentence:

Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day
when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a
Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled,
had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where
it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with
the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on
top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

Flannery O’Connor’s masterwork, The Violent Bear It Away, ends with


the fourteen-year-old Tarwater marching towards the city of destruction,
where his own career as prophet is to be suffered:

Intermittently the boy’s jagged shadow slanted across the road


ahead of him as if it cleared a rough path toward his goal. His
singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision
the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set
toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.

491
492 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

In Flannery O’Connor’s fierce vision, the children of God, all of us,


always are asleep in the outward life. Young Tarwater, clearly O’Connor’s
surrogate, is in clinical terms a borderline schizophrenic, subject to audi-
tory hallucinations in which he hears the advice of an imaginary friend who
is overtly the Christian Devil. But clinical terms are utterly alien to
O’Connor, who accepts only theological namings and unnamings. This is
necessarily a spiritual strength in O’Connor, yet it can be an aesthetic dis-
traction also, since The Violent Bear It Away is a fiction of preternatural
power, and not a religious tract. Rayber, the antagonist of both prophets,
old and young Tarwater, is an aesthetic disaster, whose defects in repre-
sentation alone keep the book from making a strong third with Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. O’Connor despises
Rayber, and cannot bother to make him even minimally persuasive. We
wince at his unlikely verbal mixture of popular sociology and confused psy-
chology, as even Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor’s partisan, is compelled to
admit:

Her weaknesses—a lack of perfect familiarity with the terminolo-


gy of the secular sociologists, psychologists, and rationalists she
often casts as adversary figures, and an evident weighting of the
scales against them all—are present in the character of Rayber
(who combines all three categories).

One hardly believes that a perfect familiarity with the writings say of
David Riesman, Erik Erikson, and Karl Popper would have enabled
O’Connor to make poor Rayber a more plausible caricature of what she
despised. We remember The Violent Bear It Away for its two prophets, and
particularly young Tarwater, who might be called a Gnostic version of
Huckleberry Finn. What makes us free is the Gnosis, according to the
most ancient of heresies. O’Connor, who insisted upon her Catholic
orthodoxy, necessarily believed that what makes us free is baptism in
Christ, and for her the title of her novel was its most important aspect,
since the words are spoken by Jesus himself:

But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you,
and more than a prophet.
For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messen-
ger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there
hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he
that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
Novelists and Novels 493

And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom
of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

I have quoted the King James Version of Matt. 11:9–12, where “and
the violent take it by force” is a touch more revealing than O’Connor’s
Catholic version, “and the violent bear it away.” For O’Connor, we are
back in or rather never have left Christ’s time of urgency, and her heart is
with those like the Tarwaters who know that the kingdom of heaven will
suffer them to take it by force:

The lack of realism would be crucial if this were a realistic novel


or if the novel demanded the kind of realism you demand. I don’t
believe it does. The old man is very obviously not a Southern
Baptist, but an independent, a prophet in the true sense. The true
prophet is inspired by the Holy Ghost, not necessarily by the
dominant religion of his region. Further, the traditional
Protestant bodies of the South are evaporating into secularism
and respectability and are being replaced on the grass roots level
by all sorts of strange sects that bear not much resemblance to tra-
ditional Protestantism—Jehovah’s Witnesses, snake-handlers,
Free Thinking Christians, Independent Prophets, the swindlers,
the mad, and sometimes the genuinely inspired. A character has to
be true to his own nature and I think the old man is that. He was
a prophet, not a church-member. As a prophet, he has to be a nat-
ural Catholic. Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote
romances; I am one of his descendants.

O’Connor’s only disputable remark in this splendid defense of her


book is the naming of old Tarwater as “a natural Catholic.” Hawthorne’s
descendant she certainly was, by way of Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and
Nathanael West, but though Hawthorne would have approved her mode,
he would have been shocked by her matter. To ignore what is authentical-
ly shocking about O’Connor is to misread her weakly. It is not her inces-
sant violence that is troublesome but rather her passionate endorsement of
that violence as the only way to startle her secular readers into a spiritual
awareness. As a visionary writer, she is determined to take us by force, to
bear us away so that we may be open to the possibility of grace. Her unbe-
lieving reader is represented by the grandmother in the famous story “A
Good Man Is Hard to Find”:

She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going
494 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re


one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on
the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him
and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun
down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean
them.

That murmur of recognition is what matters for O’Connor. The


Misfit speaks for her in his mordant observation: “She would of been a
good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of
her life.” Secular critic as I am, I need to murmur: “Surely that does make
goodness a touch too strenuous?” But O’Connor anticipates our wounded
outcries of nature against grace, since we understandably prefer a vision
that corrects nature without abolishing it. Young Tarwater himself, as fine-
ly recalcitrant a youth as Huckleberry Finn, resists not only Rayber but the
tuition of old Tarwater. A kind of swamp fox, like the Revolutionary hero
for whom he was named, the boy Tarwater waits for his own call, and
accepts his own prophetic election only after he has baptized his idiot
cousin Bishop by drowning him, and even then only in consequence of
having suffered a homosexual rape by the Devil himself. O’Connor’s
audacity reminds us of the Faulkner of Sanctuary and the West of A Cool
Million. Her theology purports to be Roman Catholicism, but her sensi-
bility is Southern Gothic, Jacobean in the mode of the early T. S. Eliot,
and even Gnostic, in the rough manner of Carlyle, a writer she is likely
never to have read.
I myself find it a critical puzzle to read her two novels, Wise Blood and
The Violent Bear It Away, and her two books of stories, A Good Man Is Hard
to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and then to turn from her
fiction to her occasional prose in Mystery and Manners, and her letters in
The Habit of Being. The essayist and letter-writer denounces Manichaeism,
Jansenism, and all other deviations from normative Roman Catholicism,
while the storyteller seems a curious blend of the ideologies of Simone
Weil reading the New Testament into the Iliad’s “poem of force” and of
René Girard assuring us that there can be no return of the sacred without
violence. Yet the actual O’Connor, in her letters, found Weil “comic and
terrible,” portraying the perpetual waiter for grace as an “angular intellec-
tual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth,” and
I suspect she would have been as funny about the violent thematicism of
Girard.
To find something of a gap between O’Connor as lay theologue and
O’Connor as a storyteller verging upon greatness may or may not be
Novelists and Novels 495

accurate but in any case intends to undervalue neither the belief nor the
fiction. I suspect though that the fiction’s implicit theology is very differ-
ent from what O’Connor thought it to be, a difference that actually
enhances the power of the novels and stories. It is not accidental that As I
Lay Dying and Miss Lonelyhearts were the only works of fiction that
O’Connor urged upon Robert Fitzgerald, or that her own prose cadences
were haunted always by the earlier rather than the later Eliot. The Waste
Land, As I Lay Dying, and Miss Lonelyhearts are not works of the Catholic
imagination but rather of that Gnostic pattern Gershom Scholem termed
“redemption through sin.” Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and stories
like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and the merciless “Parker’s Back,” take
place in the same cosmos as The Waste Land, As I Lay Dying, and Miss
Lonelyhearts. This world is the American version of the cosmological
emptiness that the ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, a sphere ruled by a
demiurge who has usurped the alien God, and who has exiled God out of
history and beyond the reach of our prayers.

II

In recognizing O’Connor’s fictive universe as being essentially


Gnostic, I dissent not only from her own repudiation of heresy but from
the sensitive reading of Jefferson Humphries, who links O’Connor to
Proust in an “aesthetic of violence”:

For O’Connor, man has been his own demiurge, the author of his
own fall, the keeper of his own cell....
The chief consequence of this partly willful, partly inherited
alienation from the sacred is that the sacred can only intrude upon
human perception as a violence, a rending of the fabric of daily
life.

On this account, which remains normative, whether Hebraic or


Catholic, we are fallen into the kenoma through our own culpability. In the
Gnostic formulation, creation and fall were one and the same event, and
all that can save us is a certain spark within us, a spark that is no part of the
creation but rather goes back to the original abyss. The grandeur or sub-
limity that shines through the ruined creation is a kind of abyss-radiance,
whether in Blake or Carlyle or the early Eliot or in such novelistic masters
of the grotesque as Faulkner, West, and O’Connor.
The ugliest of O’Connor’s stories, yet one of the strongest, is “A View
of the Woods” in Everything That Rises Must Converge. Its central characters
496 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

are the seventy-nine-year-old Mr. Fortune, and his nine-year-old grand-


daughter, Mary Fortune Pitts. I am uncertain which of the two is the more
abominable moral character or hideous human personality, partly because
they resemble one another so closely in selfishness, obduracy, false pride,
sullenness, and just plain meanness. At the story’s close, a physical battle
between the two leaves the little girl a corpse, throttled and with her head
smashed upon a rock, while her grandfather suffers a heart attack, during
which he has his final “view of the woods,” in one of O’Connor’s typically
devastating final paragraphs:

Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the bare
trunks into the tops of the pines and his heart expanded once more
with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old man felt
as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt as if he
were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward the
lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening there, a lit-
tle place where he could escape and leave the woods behind him.
He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the
white sky was reflected in the water. It grew as he tan toward it
until suddenly the whole lake opened up before him, riding majes-
tically in little corrugated folds toward his feet. He realized sud-
denly that he could not swim and that he had not bought the boat.
On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened
into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and
away into the distance. He looked around desperately for some-
one to help him but the place was deserted except for one huge
yellow monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorg-
ing itself on clay.

The huge yellow monster is a bulldozer, and so is the dying Mr.


Fortune, and so was the dead Mary Fortune Pitts. What sustains our inter-
est in such antipathetic figures in so grossly unsympathetic a world?
O’Connor’s own commentary does not help answer the question, and
introduces a bafflement quite its own:

The woods, if anything, are the Christ symbol. They walk across
the water, they are bathed in a red light, and they in the end escape
the old man’s vision and march off over the hills. The name of the
story is a view of the woods and the woods alone are pure enough
to be a Christ symbol if anything is. Part of the tension of the
story is created by Mary Fortune and the old man being images of
Novelists and Novels 497

each other but opposite in the end. One is saved and the other is
dammed [sic] and there is no way out of it, it must be pointed out
and underlined. Their fates are different. One has to die first
because one kills the other, but you have read it wrong if you think
they die in different places. The old man dies by her side; he only
thinks he runs to the edge of the lake, that is his vision.

What divine morality it can be that saves Mary Fortune and damns her
wretched grandfather is beyond my ken, but the peculiarities of
O’Connor’s sense of the four last things transcend me at all times, anyway.
What is more interesting is O’Connor’s own final view of the woods. Her
sacramental vision enables her to see Christ in “the gaunt trees [that] had
thickened into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water
and away into the distance.” Presumably their marching away is emblem-
atic of Mr. Fortune’s damnation, so far as O’Connor is concerned. As a
reader of herself, I cannot rank O’Connor very high here. Surely Mary
Fortune is as damnable and damned as her grandfather, and the woods are
damnable and damned also. They resemble not the normative Christ but
the Jesus of the Gnostic texts, whose phantom only suffers upon the cross
while the true Christ laughs far off in the alien heavens, in the ultimate
abyss.
O’Connor’s final visions are more equivocal than she evidently intend-
ed. Here is the conclusion of “Revelation”:

Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin
remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorb-
ing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her
head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a
field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into
the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen
in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her
eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending
upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast
horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole
companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and
bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and
lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bring-
ing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she
recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had
always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it
right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were
498 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as


they had always been for good order and common sense and
respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by
their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being
burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the
hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead.
In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was,
immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her
slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around
her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she
heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the star-
ry field and shouting hallelujah.

This is meant to burn away false or apparent virtues, and yet consumes
not less than everything. In O’Connor’s mixed realm, which is neither
nature nor grace, Southern reality nor private phantasmagoria, all are nec-
essarily damned, not by an aesthetic of violence but by a Gnostic aesthet-
ic in which there is no knowing unless the knower becomes one with the
known. Her Catholic moralism masked from O’Connor something of her
own aesthetic of the grotesque. Certainly her essay on “Some Aspects of
the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” evades what is central in her own prax-
is:

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a


penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still
able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to
have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the
general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That
is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost any-
thing you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next
breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the
standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the
South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunt-
ed. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid
that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.
Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shad-
ows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak
can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he
attains some depth in literature.
Novelists and Novels 499

The freakish displacement here is from “wholeness,” which is then


described as the state of having been made in the image or likeness of God.
But that mode, displacement, is not what is operative in O’Connor’s fic-
tion. Her own favorite, among her people, is young Tarwater, who is not a
freak, and who is so likeable because he values his own freedom above
everything and anyone, even his call as a prophet. We are moved by
Tarwater because of his recalcitrance, because he is the Huck Finn of
visionaries. But he moves O’Connor, even to identification, because of his
inescapable prophetic vocation. It is the interplay between Tarwater fight-
ing to be humanly free, and Tarwater besieged by his great-uncle’s train-
ing, by the internalized Devil, and most of all by O’Connor’s own ferocious
religious zeal, that constitutes O’Connor’s extraordinary artistry. Her
pious admirers to the contrary, O’Connor would have bequeathed us even
stronger novels and stories, of the eminence of Faulkner’s, if she had been
able to restrain her spiritual tendentiousness.
N O V E L S
A N D

Gabriel García Márquez


N O V E L I S T S

(1928–)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

MACONDO, ACCORDING TO CARLOS FUENTES, “BEGINS TO PROLIFERATE


with the richness of a Columbian Yoknapatawpha.” Faulkner, crossed by
Kafka, is the literary origins of Gabriel García Márquez. So pervasive is the
Faulknerian influence that at times one hears Joyce and Conrad, Faulkner’s
masters, echoed in García Márquez, yet almost always as mediated by
Faulkner. The Autumn of the Patriarch may be too pervaded by Faulkner,
but One Hundred Years of Solitude absorbs Faulkner, as it does all other influ-
ences, into a phantasmagoria so powerful and self-consistent that the read-
er never questions the authority of García Márquez. Perhaps, as Reinard
Argas suggested, Faulkner is replaced by Carpentier and Kafka by Borges
in One Hundred Years of Solitude, so that the imagination of García Márquez
domesticates itself within its own language. Macondo, visionary realm, is
an Indian and Hispanic act of consciousness, very remote from Oxford,
Mississippi, and from the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In his subsequent
work, García Márquez went back to Faulkner and Kafka, but then One
Hundred Years of Solitude is a miracle and could only happen once, if only
because it is less a novel than it is a Scripture, the Bible of Macondo;
Melquíades the Magus, who writes in Sanskrit, may be more a mask for
Borges than for the author himself, and yet the Gypsy storyteller also con-
nects García Márquez to the archaic Hebrew storyteller, the Yahwist, at
once the greatest of realists and the greatest of fantasists but above all the
only true rival of Homer and Tolstoy as a storyteller.
My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of
Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full
of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb. Whether the

500
Novelists and Novels 501

impacted quality of this novel’s texture is finally a virtue I am not sure,


since sometimes I feel like a man invited to dinner who has been served
nothing but an enormous platter of Turkish Delight. Yet it is all story,
where everything conceivable and inconceivable is happening at once,
from creation to apocalypse, birth to death. Roberto González Echevarría
has gone so far as to surmise that in some sense it is the reader who must
die at the end of the story, and perhaps it is the sheer richness of the text
that serves to destroy us. Joyce half-seriously envisioned an ideal reader
cursed with insomnia who would spend her life in unpacking Finnegans
Wake. The reader need not translate One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel
that deserves its popularity as it has no surface difficulties whatsoever. And
yet, a new dimension is added to reading by this book. Its ideal reader has
to be like its most memorable personage, the sublimely outrageous
Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who “had wept in his mother’s womb and
been born with his eyes open.” There are no wasted sentences, no mere
transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment
you read it. It will all cohere, at least as myth and metaphor if not always
as literary meaning.
In the presence of an extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the
place of imagination. That Emersonian maxim is Wallace Stevens’s and is
worthy of the visionary of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction and An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven. Macondo is a supreme fiction, and there are no
ordinary evenings within its boundaries. Satire, even parody, and most fan-
tasy—these are now scarcely possible in the United States. How can you
satirize Ronald Reagan or Jerry Falwell? Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
ceases to seem fantasy whenever I visit Southern California, and a ride on
the New York City subway tends to reduce all literary realism to an ideal-
izing projection. Some aspects of Latin American existence transcend even
the inventions of García Márquez. I am informed, on good authority, that
the older of the Duvalier dictators of Haiti, the illustrious Papa Doc, com-
manded that all black dogs in his nation be destroyed when he came to
believe that a principal enemy had transformed himself into a black dog.
Much that is fantastic in One Hundred Years of Solitude would be fantastic
anywhere, but much that seems unlikely to a North American critic may
well be a representation of reality.
Emir Monegal emphasized that García Márquez’s masterwork was
unique among Latin American novels, being radically different from the
diverse achievements of Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Lezama Lima,
Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Angel Asturias, Manuel Puig, Guillermo
Cabrera Infante, and so many more. The affinities to Borges and to
Carpentier were noted by Monegal as by Arenas, but Monegal’s dialectical
502 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

point seemed to be that García Márquez was representative only by join-


ing all his colleagues in not being representative. Yet it is now true that, for
most North American readers, One Hundred Years of Solitude comes first to
mind when they think of the Hispanic novel in America. Alejo Carpentier’s
Explosion in a Cathedral may be an even stronger book, but only Borges has
dominated the North American literary imagination as García Márquez
has with his grand fantasy. It is inevitable that we are fated to identify One
Hundred Years of Solitude with an entire culture, almost as though it were a
new Don Quixote, which it most definitely is not. Comparisons to Balzac
and even to Faulkner are also not very fair to García Márquez. The titan-
ic inventiveness of Balzac dwarfs the later visionary, and nothing even in
Macondo is as much a negative Sublime as the fearsome quest of the
Bundrens in As I Lay Dying. One Hundred Years of Solitude is more of the
stature of Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, latecom-
ers’ fantasies, strong inheritors of waning traditions.
Whatever its limitations may or may not be, García Márquez’s major
narrative now enjoys canonical status as well as a representative function.
Its cultural status continues to be enhanced, and it would be foolish to
quarrel with so large a phenomenon. I wish to address myself only to the
question of how seriously, as readers, we need to receive the book’s scrip-
tural aspect. The novel’s third sentence is: “The world was so recent that
things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to
point,” and the third sentence from the end is long and beautiful:

Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being


spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano
skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only
too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living,
deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deci-
phering the last page of the parchment, as if he were looking into
a speaking mirror.

The time span between this Genesis and this Apocalypse is six gener-
ations, so that José Arcadio Buendía, the line’s founder, is the grandfather
of the last Aureliano’s grandfather. The grandfather of Dante’s grandfather,
the crusader Cassaguida, tells his descendant Dante that the poet perceives
the truth because he gazes into that mirror in which the great and small of
this life, before they think, behold their thought. Aureliano, at the end,
reads the Sanskrit parchment of the gypsy, Borges-like Magus, and looks
into a speaking mirror, beholding his thought before he thinks it. But does
he, like Dante, behold the truth? Was Florence, like Macondo, a city of
Novelists and Novels 503

mirrors (or mirages) in contrast to the realities of the Inferno, the


Purgatorio, the Paradiso? Is One Hundred Years of Solitude only a speaking
mirror? Or does it contain, somehow within it, an Inferno, a Purgatorio, a
Paradiso?
Only the experience and disciplined reflections of a great many more
strong readers will serve to answer those questions with any conclusive-
ness. The final eminence of One Hundred Years of Solitude for now remains
undecided. What is clear to the book’s contemporaries is that García
Márquez has given contemporary culture, in North America and Europe,
as much as in Latin America, one of its double handful of necessary narra-
tives, without which we will understand neither one another nor our own
selves.

Love in the Time of Cholera

The aesthetic principle of Love in the Time of Cholera is only a slightly chas-
tened version of what might be the motto of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“Anything goes”, or even “Everything goes”. Anything and everything
goes into the mix: Faulkner, Kafka Borges, Carpentier, Conrad, Joyce.
Both novels are Scriptures: Solitude is an Old Testament, and Cholera a
New Testament, at least for García Márquez and the most devoted of his
readers and critics. I myself have come to value Cholera over Solitude, but
that is a choice of riches.
What Faulkner—who most valued the Bible (as literature only),
Shakespeare, Melville, Conrad, and Joyce—would have made of these
New World Hispanic masterpieces, I cannot surmise. The verbal cascades
he would have recognized as akin to his own, and the heroic individualism
surely would have moved him. Yet he went about while waiting for his
doom to lift, and his greatest figures—Darl Bundren, Quentin Compson,
Sutpen, Joe Christmas, Popeye—are damned beyond damnation. Though
Faulkner could be as grandly comic as Dickens, as is witnessed by the
Snopes family, who now constitute the Texan Republican party, led by Tom
De Lay Snopes, while our nation has chosen Benito Bush as Il Duce. Oscar
Wilde was always right: life has no choice but to imitate art.
The antic joy of García Márquez might have been shrugged away by
Faulkner, at least in his tragic mode, but he would have approved the last-
ditch humanism affirmed both by precursor and latecomer. Decadence,
the obsessive fear of incest, the drowning out of creative solitude by an
ocean of information: these are common themes and apprehensions. What
then is the saving difference, besides amazing high spirits in García
Márquez, that distinguishes the two?
504 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Faulkner’s hopes rarely are persuasive: his greatest characters are as


nihilistic as Shakespeare’s. The immense popularity of García Márquez
was earned by his exuberance, which veils his own apocalyptic forebodings.
What Shakespeare was to Faulkner, Cervantes necessarily is to García
Márquez: the truest ancestor. Cervantes, in his dark wisdom, is not less
nihilistic than Shakespeare, and I do not believe that either ultimately was
a Christian believer, any more than Faulkner or García Márquez can be
said to be.
García Márquez’s difference from all three is more evident in Cholera
than in Solitude: he really does have a High Romantic faith in Eros, though
he knows the Freudian truth that love too frequently is a mask for the
Death Drive. Yet I prefer Cholera to Solitude finally because Florentine
Ariza is dauntless, as here in the novel’s closing passage:

“Let us keep going, going, going, back to La Dorada.”


Fermina Daza shuddered because she recognized his former
voice, illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and she looked
at the Captain: he was their destiny. But the Captain did not see
her because he was stupefied by Florentino Ariza’s tremendous
powers of inspiration.
“Do you mean what you say?” he asked.
“From the moment I was born,” said Florentino Ariza, “I have
never said anything I did not mean.”
The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelash-
es the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino
Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was over-
whelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death,
that has no limit.
“And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn
coming and going?” he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years,
seven months, and eleven days and nights.
“Forever,” he said.
N O V E L I S T S
Ursula K. Le Guin

A N D
(1929–)

N O V E L S
The Left Hand of Darkness

IN A RECENT PARABLE, “SHE UNNAMES THEM” (THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY


21, 1985), the best contemporary author of literary fantasy sums up the
consequences of Eve’s unnaming of the animals that Adam had named:

None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them
when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way
or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for
a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names
had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close
that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear.
And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one
another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood
or flesh, keep one another warm—that attraction was now all one
with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted,
nor the eater from the food.

This might serve as a coda for all Ursula Kroeber Le Guin’s varied
works to date. She is essentially a mythological fantasist; the true genre for
her characteristic tale is romance, and she has a high place in the long
American tradition of the romance, a dominant mode among us from
Hawthorne down to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine. Because sci-
ence fiction is a popular mode, she is named as a science-fiction writer, and
a certain defiance in her proudly asserts that the naming is accurate. But no

505
506 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

one reading, say Philip K. Dick, as I have been doing after reading Le
Guin’s discussion of his work in The Language of the Night, is likely to asso-
ciate the prose achievement of Le Guin with that of her acknowledged pre-
cursor. She is a fierce defender of the possibilities for science fiction, to the
extent of calling Philip K. Dick “our own homegrown Borges” and even of
implying that Dick ought not to be compared to Kafka only because Dick
is “not an absurdist” and his work “is not (as Kafka’s was) autistic.”
After reading Dick, one can only murmur that a literary critic is in slight
danger of judging Dick to be “our Borges” or of finding Dick in the cosmos
of Kafka, the Dante of our century. But Le Guin as critic, loyal to her col-
leagues who publish in such periodicals as Fantastic, Galaxy, Amazing, Orbit
and the rest, seems to me not the same writer as the visionary of The Earthsea
Trilogy, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and The Beginning Place.
Better than Tolkien, far better than Doris Lessing, Le Guin is the over-
whelming contemporary instance of a superbly imaginative creator and
major stylist who chose (or was chosen by) “fantasy and science fiction.” At
her most remarkable, as in what still seems to me her masterpiece, The Left
Hand of Darkness, she offers a sexual vision that strangely complements
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover.
I can think of only one modern fantasy I prefer to The Left Hand of Darkness,
and that is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920), but Lindsay’s uncanny
nightmare of a book survives its dreadful writing, while Le Guin seems never
to have written a wrong or bad sentence. One has only to quote some of her
final sentences to know again her absolute rhetorical authority:

But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they
had always been.
(The Dispossessed)

Gravely she walked beside him up the white streets of Havnor,


holding his hand, like a child coming home.
(The Tombs of Atuan)

There is more than one road to the city.


(The Beginning Place)

But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, “Will you tell us how
he died?—Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the
stars—the other kinds of men, the other lives?”
(The Left Hand of Darkness)
Novelists and Novels 507

When her precise, dialectical style—always evocative, sometimes sub-


lime in its restrained pathos—is exquisitely fitted to her powers of inven-
tion, as in The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin achieves a kind of sensibili-
ty very nearly unique in contemporary fiction. It is the pure storyteller’s
sensibility that induces in the reader a state of uncertainty, of not knowing
what comes next. What Walter Benjamin praised in Leskov is exactly rele-
vant to Le Guin:

Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He


has borrowed his authority from death....
The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller
of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy
tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest.
This need was the need created by the myth. The fairy tale tells
us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the
nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest....

Elsewhere in his essay on Leskov, Benjamin asserts that: “The art of


storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is
dying out.” One can be skeptical of Benjamin’s Marxist judgment that such
a waning, if waning it be, is “only a concomitant symptom of the secular
productive forces of history.” Far more impressively, Benjamin once
remarked of Kafka’s stories that in them, “narrative art regains the signifi-
cance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: to postpone the future.” Le
Guin’s narrative art, though so frequently set in the future, not only bor-
rows its authority from death but also works to postpone the future, works
to protect us against myth and its nightmares.
I am aware that this is hardly consonant with the accounts of her nar-
rative purposes that Le Guin gives in the essays of The Language of the
Night. But Lawrence’s adage is perfectly applicable to Le Guin: trust the
tale, not the teller, and there is no purer storyteller writing now in English
than Le Guin. Her true credo is spoken by one of her uncanniest creations,
Faxe the Weaver, master of the Foretelling, to conclude the beautiful chap-
ter, “The Domestication of Hunch,” in The Left Hand of Darkness:

“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unfore-
told, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the
ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were
proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No
Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearth gods, nothing. But also if it were
proven that there is a God, there would be no religion..... Tell me,
508 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the


one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”
“That we shall die.”
“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered,
Genry, and we already know the answer ... the only thing that
makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not
knowing what comes next.”

The fine irony, that this is the master Foreteller speaking, is almost
irrelevant to Le Guin’s profound narrative purpose. She herself is the mas-
ter of a dialectical narrative mode in which nothing happens without
involving its opposite. The shrewdly elliptical title, The Left Hand of
Darkness, leaves out the crucial substantive in Le Guin’s Taoist verse:

Light is the left hand of darkness


and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

The way is the Tao, exquisitely fused by Le Guin into her essentially
Northern mythology. “Kemmer” is the active phase of the cycle of human
sexuality on the planet Gethen or Winter, the site of The Left Hand of
Darkness. Winter vision, even in the books widely separated in substance
and tone from her masterpiece, best suits Le Guin’s kind of storytelling.
Mythology, from her childhood on, seems to have meant Norse rather
than Classical stories. Like Blake’s and Emily Brontë’s, her imagination is
at home with Odin and Yggdrasil. Yet she alters the cosmos of the Eddas
so that it loses some, not all, of its masculine aggressiveness and stoic
harshness. Her Taoism, rather than her equivocal Jungianism, has the
quiet force that tempers the ferocity of the Northern vision.

II

“Visibility without discrimination, solitude without privacy,” is Le


Guin’s judgment upon the capital of the Shing, who in 4370 A.D. rule what
had been the United States, in her novel, City of Illusions. In an introduc-
tion to The Left Hand of Darkness, belatedly added to the book seven years
after its publication, Le Guin sharply reminds us that: “I write science fic-
tion, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more
Novelists and Novels 509

about the future than you do, and very likely less.” Like Faxe the Weaver,
she prefers ignorance of the future, and yet, again like Faxe, she is a mas-
ter of Foretelling, which both is and is not a mode of moral prophecy. It is,
in that it offers a moral vision of the present; it is not, precisely because it
refuses to say that “If you go on so, the result is so.” The United States in
1985 still offers “visibility without discrimination, solitude without priva-
cy.” As for the United States in 4370, one can quote “Self,” a lyric medita-
tion from Le Guin’s rather neglected Hard Words and Other Poems (1981):

You cannot measure the circumference


but there are centerpoints:
stones, and a woman washing at a ford,
the water runs red-brown from what she washes.
The mouths of caves. The mouths of bells.
The sky in winter under snowclouds
to northward, green of jade.
No star is farther from it than the glint
of mica in a pebble in the hand,
or nearer. Distance is my god.

Distance, circumference, the unmeasurable, goal, the actual future


which can only be our dying; Le Guin evades these, and her narratives
instead treasure wisdom or the centerpoints. Yet the poem just before “Self ”
in Hard Words, cunningly titled “Amazed,” tells us where wisdom is to be
found, in the disavowal of “I” by “eye,” a not un-Emersonian epiphany:

The center is not where the center is


but where I will be when I follow
the lines of stones that wind about a center
that is not there
but there.
The lines of stones lead inward, bringing
the follower to the beginning
where all I knew
is flew.
Stone is stone and more than stone;
the center opens like an eyelid opening.
Each rose a maze: the hollow hills:
I am not I
but eye.
510 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

One thinks of the shifting centers in every Le Guin narrative, and of


her naming the mole as her totem in another poem. She is a maze maker
or “shaper of darkness / into ways and hollows,” who always likes the coun-
try on the other side. Or she is “beginning’s daughter” who “sings of
stones.” Her Taoism celebrates the strength of water over stone, and yet
stone is her characteristic trope. As her words are hard, so are most of her
women and men, fit after all for Northern or winter myth. One can say off
her that she writes a hard-edged phantasmagoria, or that it is the
Promethean rather than the Narcissistic element in her literary fantasy
that provides her with her motive for metaphor.
In some sense, all of her writings call us forth to quest into stony
places, where the object of the quest can never quite he located. Her most
mature quester, the scientist Shevek in The Dispossessed, comes to appre-
hend that truly he is both subject and object in the quest, always already
gone on, always already there. A Promethean anarchist, Shevek has sur-
mounted self-consciousness and self-defense, but at the cost of a consider-
able loss in significance. He represents Le Guin’s ideal Odonian society,
where the isolated idealist like Shelley or Kropotkin has become the norm,
yet normative anarchism cannot be represented except as permanent rev-
olution, and permanent revolution defies aesthetic as well as political rep-
resentation. Shevek is beyond these limits of representation and more than
that, “his hands were empty, as they had always been.” Deprived of the
wounded self-regard that our primary narcissism converts into aggression,
Shevek becomes nearly as colorless as the actual personality upon whom
he is based, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Even Le Guin cannot have
it both ways; the ideological anarchism of The Dispossessed divests her hero
of his narcissistic ego, and so of much of his fictive interest. Jung is a bet-
ter psychological guide in purely mythic realms, like Le Guin’s Earthsea,
then he is in psychic realms closer to our own, as in The Dispossessed.

III

Le Guin’s greatest accomplishment, certainly reflecting the finest bal-


ance of her powers, is The Left Hand of Darkness, though I hasten to name
this her finest work to date. At fifty-five, she remains beginning’s daughter,
and there are imaginative felicities in The Beginning Place (1980) that are
subtler and bolder than anything in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). But
conceptually and stylistically, Left Hand is the strongest of her dozen or so
major narratives. It is a book that sustains many rereadings, partly because
its enigmas are unresolvable, and partly because it has the crucial quality of
a great representation, which is that it yields up new perspectives upon
Novelists and Novels 511

what we call reality. Though immensely popular (some thirty paperback


printings), it seems to me critically undervalued, with rather too much
emphasis upon its supposed flaws. The best known negative critique is by
Stanislaw Lem, who judged the sexual element in the book irrelevant to its
story, and improbably treated in any case. This is clearly a weak misread-
ing on Lem’s part. What the protagonist, Genly Ai, continuously fails to
understand about the inhabitants of the planet Winter is precisely that
their sexuality gives them a mode of consciousness profoundly alien to his
(and ours). Le Guin, with admirable irony, replied to feminist and other
critics that indeed she had “left out too much” and could “only be very
grateful to those readers, men and women, whose willingness to participate
in the experiment led them to fill in that omission with the work of their
own imagination.” Too courteous to say, with Blake, that her care was not
to make matters explicit to the idiot, Le Guin wisely has relied upon her
extraordinary book to do its work of self-clarification across the fifteen
years of its reception.
The book’s principal aesthetic strength is its representation of the
character and personality of Estraven, the Prime Minister who sacrifices
position, honor, freedom and finally his life in order to hasten the future,
by aiding Genly Ai’s difficult mission. As the ambassador of the Ekumen,
a benign federation of planets, Ai needs to surmount his own perspective
as a disinterested cultural anthropologist if he is to understand the androg-
ynes who make up the entire population of the isolated planet alternative-
ly called Gethen or Winter. Without understanding, there is no hope of
persuading them, even for their own obvious good, to join with the rest of
the cosmos. What is most interesting about Ai (the name suggesting at
once the ego, the eye, and an outcry of pain) is his reluctance to go beyond
the limits of his own rationality, which would require seeing the causal link
between his sexuality and mode of consciousness.
The sexuality of the dwellers upon the planet Winter remains Le
Guin’s subtlest and most surprising invention:

A Gethenian in first-phase kemmer, if kept alone or with others


not in kemmer, remains incapable of coitus. Yet the sexual impulse
is tremendously strong in this phase, controlling the entire per-
sonality, subjecting all other drives to its imperative. When the
individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is fur-
ther stimulated (most importantly by touch—secretion? scent?)
until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance
is established. The genitals engorge or shrink accordingly, fore-
play intensifies, and the partner, triggered by the chance, takes on
512 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the other sexual role (? without exception? If there are exceptions,


resulting in kemmer—partners of the same sex, they are so rare as
to be ignored).

The narrator here is neither Ai nor Le Guin but a field investigator of


the Ekumen, wryly cataloging a weird matter. Her field notes add a num-
ber of sharper observations: these androgynes have no sexual drive at all for
about 21 or 22 out of every 26 days. Anyone can and usually does bear chil-
dren, “and the mother of several children may he the father of several
more,” descent being reckoned from the mother, known as “the parent in
the flesh.” There is no Oedipal ambivalence of children toward parents, no
rape or unwilling sex, no dualistic division of humankind into active and
passive. All Gethenians are natural monists, with no need to sublimate any-
thing, and little inclination towards warfare.
Neither Le Guin nor any of her narrators give us a clear sense of any
casual relation between a world of nearly perpetual winter and the ambisex-
ual nature of its inhabitants, yet an uncanny association between the context
of coldness and the unforeseeable sexuality of each individual persists
throughout. Though Lem insisted anxiety must attend the unpredictability
of one’s gender, Le Guin’s book persuasively refuses any such anxiety. There
is an imaginative intimation that entering upon any sexual identity for about
one-fifth of the time is more than welcome to anyone who must battle per-
petually just to stay warm! Le Guin’s humor, here as elsewhere, filters in
slyly, surprising us in a writer who is essentially both somber and serene.
The one Gethenian we get to know well is Estraven, certainly a more
sympathetic figure than the slow-to-learn Ai. Estraven is Le Guin’s great-
est triumph in characterization, and yet remains enigmatic, as he must.
How are we to understand the psychology of a manwoman, utterly free of
emotional ambivalence, of which the masterpiece after all is the Oedipal
conflict? And how are we to understand a fiercely competitive person,
since the Gethenians are superbly agonistic, who yet lacks any component
of sexual aggressiveness, let alone its cause in a sexually wounded narcis-
sism? Most fundamentally we are dualists, and perhaps our involuntary and
Universal Freudianism (present even in a professed Jungian, like Le Guin)
is the result of that being the conceptualized dualism most easily available
to us. But the people of Winter are Le Guin’s shrewd way of showing us
that all our dualisms—Platonic, Pauline, Cartesian, Freudian—not only
have a sexual root but are permanent because we are bisexual rather than
ambisexual beings. Freud obviously would not have disagreed, and evi-
dently Le Guin is more Freudian than she acknowledges herself to be.
Winter, aside from its properly ghastly weather, is no Utopia. Karhide,
Novelists and Novels 513

Estraven’s country, is ruled by a clinically mad king, and the rival power,
Orgoreyn, is founded upon a barely hidden system of concentration
camps. Androgyny is clearly neither a political nor a sexual ideal in The Left
Hand of Darkness. And yet, mysteriously and beautifully, the book suggests
that Winter’s ambisexuality is a more imaginative condition than our bisex-
uality. Like the unfallen Miltonic angels, the Gethenians know more than
either men or women can know. As with the angels, this does not make
them better or wiser, but evidently they see more than we do, since each
one of them is Tiresias, as it were. This, at last, is the difference between
Estraven and Genly Ai. Knowing and seeing more, Estraven is better able
to love, and freer therefore to sacrifice than his friend can be.
Yet that, though imaginative, is merely a generic difference. Le Guin’s
art is to give us also a more individual difference between Ai and Estraven.
Ai is a kind of skeptical Horatio who arrives almost too late at a love for
Estraven as a kind of ambisexual Hamlet, but who survives, like Horatio,
to tell his friend’s story:

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sex-
ual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not
assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship
between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our
exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bit-
ter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But
it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and
likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came....

The difference is more than sexual, and so cannot be bridged by sexu-


al love, which Ai and Estraven avoid. It is the difference between Horatio
and Hamlet, between the audience’s surrogate and the tragic hero, who is
beyond both surrogate and audience. Estraven dies in Ai’s arms, but utter-
ing his own dead brother’s name, that brother having peen his incestuous
lover, and father of Estraven’s son. In a transference both curious and mov-
ing, Estraven has associated Ai with his lost brother-lover, to whom he had
vowed faithfulness. It is another of Le Guin’s strengths that, in context, this
has intense pathos and nothing of the grotesque whatsoever. More than dis-
belief becomes suspended by the narrative art of The Left Hand of Darkness.

IV

That Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high lit-
erature, for our time, seems evident to me because her questers never
514 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

abandon the world where we have to live, the world of Freud’s reality prin-
ciple. Her praise of Tolkien does not convince me that The Lord of the Rings
is not tendentious and moralizing, but her generosity does provide an
authentic self-description:

For like all great artists he escapes ideology by being too quick for
its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its
rationality, too real for its generalizations.

This introduction could end there, but I would rather allow Le Guin
to speak of herself directly:

Words are my matter. I have chipped one stone


for thirty years and still it is not done,
that image of the thing I cannot see.
I cannot finish it and set it free,
transformed to energy.

There is a touch of Yeats here, Le Guin’s voice being most her own in
narrative prose, but the burden is authentic Le Guin: the sense of limit, the
limits of the senses, the granite labor at hard words, and the ongoing image
that is her characteristic trope, an unfinished stone. Like her Genly Ai, she
is a far-fetcher, to use her own term for visionary metaphor. It was also the
Elizabethan rhetorician Puttenham’s term for transumption or metalepsis,
the trope that reverses time, and makes lateness into an earliness. Le Guin
is a grand far-fetcher or transumer of the true tradition of romance we call
literary fantasy. No one else now among us matches her at rendering freely
“that image of the thing I cannot see.”
N O V E L I S T S
Toni Morrison

A N D
(1931–)

N O V E L S
Sula

POLITICAL INTERPRETATION HAS BEEN ALL THE RAGE, ACADEMIC AND


journalistic, during the last thirty years. No contemporary novelist of any-
thing like Toni Morrison’s eminence is so insistent that she desires political
interpretation by her exegetes. She certainly has received what she calls for:
an entire sect of cheerleaders crowd in her wake. Very little can be done
against such a fashion at this time. If the United States achieves a larger
measure of social justice in a generation or so, then Morrison yet may be
esteemed more for her narrative art, invention, and style than for her exem-
plary political correctness. Myself an archaic survival, a dinosaur still lurch-
ing about the halls of Yale and New York University, I go on reading for aes-
thetic experience only. This introduction therefore will consider Sula only
as an artistic achievement, and not as a weapon wielded against indubitable
societal oppression by a celebrated African-American feminist Marxist.
Sula herself is a total rebel against all society, all conventions and near-
ly all moralities. A “demon” in the eyes of the black community, Sula is a
kind of Lilith, taking sexual satisfaction where she will. No evil but doom-
eager, Sula quests desperately for freedom, but she necessarily is self-vic-
timized, as Morrison make clear:

In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other
half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination.
Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or
strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and
her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness
and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her

515
516 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

with all she longed for. And like any artist with no art form, she
became dangerous.

Trust the tale and not the teller: is Sula an artist without an art form,
or is she a Zora Neale Hurston-like vitalist who has wandered into the
wrong novel? Morrison brooks no rivals: Ralph Ellison is a hidden target
in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, while Hurston’s heroic egoism is par-
odied in Sula. Aesthetically, this is all to the good; Morrison is at her best
when she is most agonistic. Sula Peace bears a name itself ironic, since her
mode of individualism can achieve no peace whatsoever. Her mother
Hannah, the freest of all erotic beings, dies in an accidental fire that can be
interpreted as a punishment only if you are morally diseased. Sula, like
Hannah, is a natural seductress, a witch if again you have it so. But ideo-
logical readings of her pathos seem to me as irrelevant as moral judgments;
Sula floats free of interpretative designs, including Morrison’s own. She
remains Morrison’s most memorable character, largely because she resists
categorization. Her challenge to the community is both ancient and orig-
inal; doom-eagerness cannot be confined. Her intensity and fatedness are
alike Faulknerian; she would give another dimension to Sanctuary, without
disturbing the violent cosmos of that now underrated novel. As a vivid fig-
ure, she is curiously unique in Morrison’s fiction, and we allegorize or
moralize Sula to our own loss. No program of Liberation would have saved
her from herself, or from the individuality of her familial past.

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, was published when she was thirty-
nine and is anything but novice work. Michael Wood, an authentic literary
critic, made the best comment on this “lucid and eloquent” narrative that
I have ever seen:

Each member of the family interprets and acts out of his or her
ugliness, but none of then understands that the all-knowing mas-
ter is not God but only history and habit; the projection of their
own numbed collusion with the mythology of beauty and ugliness
that oppresses them beyond their already grim social oppression.

Morrison herself, in an Afterword of 1994, looked back across a quar-


ter-century and emphasized her “reliance for full comprehension in codes
embedded in black culture.” A reader who is not black or female must do the
best he can; like Michael Wood, I have found The Bluest Eye to be completely
Novelists and Novels 517

lucid since I first read it, back in 1970. Like Sula and The Song of Solomon
after it, the book seems to me successful in universal terms, even if one
shares neither Morrison’s origins nor her ideologies. Beloved, Morrison’s
most famous romance narrative, seems to be to be problematic, though it
has reached a vast audience. A generation or two will have to pass before a
balanced judgment could be rendered upon Beloved or Morrison’s later
novels, Jazz and Paradise. But her early phase has many of the canonical
qualifications of the traditional Western literary kind that she fiercely
rejects as being irrelevant to her.
The essays reprinted in this volume are, almost all of them, ideologi-
cal, and follow Morrison’s lead in being the kind of appreciation that she
wants. I add a brief appreciation here, in the full awareness that I am nec-
essarily incorrect, since I am an outworn aesthete, and not a “cultural crit-
ic.” What I never forget about The Bluest Eye is its terrifying penultimate
paragraph, where the narrator censures herself and her friends for turning
away from Pecola because the child’s madness, engendered by the trauma
of being raped by her father, Cholly, “bored us in the end”:

Oh, some of us “loved” her. The Maginot Line. And Cholly loved
her. I’m sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her
enough to touch her, envelope her, give something of her filled
the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than
the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love vio-
lently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but
the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the
beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one
is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.

The unhappy wisdom of this is happily free of any cultural narcissism


whatsoever. Class, race, even gender do not over-determine this bleakness.
Morrison’s heroic survivors in Beloved are intended to stand up both in and
against their history. Perhaps they do, but the torments they have endured
also are tendentiously elaborated, because the author has an ideological
design upon us, her guilty readers, white and black, male and female. The
narrator of The Bluest Eye persuades me, where the narration of Beloved
does not. In D.H. Lawrence’s terms, I trust both the tale and the teller in
The Bluest Eye. In Beloved, I do not trust the tale.

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), seems to me her


518 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

masterwork to date, though Beloved (1987) has even more readers. A


superb, highly conscious artist from her beginning, Morrison is also a
committed social activist. Exemplary as it is, her African-American femi-
nist stance is the prime concern of nearly all her critics, which makes for a
certain monotony in their cheerleading. Morrison is scarcely responsible
for them, though I detect an intensification of ideological fervor when I
pass from rereading Song of Solomon to rereading Beloved and then go on to
Jazz and Paradise, her most recent novels. A novelist’s politics are part of
her panoply, her arms and armor. Time stales our coverings; fictions that
endure do so despite the passionate commitments of their authors, while
claques, however sincere, do not assure literary survival. The very titles of
many of the essays in this volume testify to political obsessions: “black cul-
tural nationalism,” “myth, ideology, and gender,” “race and class con-
sciousness,” “political identity,” “competing discourses.” Morrison, far
cannier than her enthusiasts, at her most persuasive transcends her own
indubitable concerns. Her art, grounded in African-American realities and
concerns, is nevertheless not primarily naturalistic in its aims and modes.
Morrison has been vehement in asserting that African-American liter-
ature is her aesthetic context: she has invoked slave narratives, folklore,
spirituals, and jazz songs. So advanced a stylist and storyteller is not likely
to celebrate Zora Neale Hurston as a forerunner, or to imagine a relation
between herself and Richard Wright, or James Baldwin. Her authentic
rival is the late Ralph Waldo Ellison, whose Invisible Man remains the most
extraordinary achievement in African-American fiction. Morrison subtly
wards off Invisible Man (1952), from The Bluest Eye (1970) on to Paradise.
Though she has deprecated the “complex series of evasions” of Modernist
literature and its criticism, no one is more brilliant at her own complex
series of evasions, particularly of Ralph Ellison, unwanted strong precur-
sor. This is not to suggest that Ellison is her prime precursor: William
Faulkner shadows Morrison’s work always, and inspires even more creative
evasions in her best writing.
I am aware that I am at variance with nearly all of Morrison’s critics,
who take their lead from her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, one of her most adroit evasions of the central Western liter-
ary tradition that, in mere fact, has fostered her. But then, as a profession-
al literary critic, I must declare an interest, since my argument for the
inescapability of what I have termed “the anxiety of influence” is contest-
ed by the culturally correct. There is no anguish of contamination or guilt
of inheritance for black women writers in particular, I frequently am
admonished. Patriarchal, capitalistic, phallocentric notions must be swept
aside: they are racist, sexist, exclusionary, exploitative. If even Shakespeare
Novelists and Novels 519

can become Alternative Shakespeare, then Toni Morrison can spring full-
grown from the head of Black Athena.
Every strong writer welcomes the opportunity to be an original, and
Morrison’s literary achievement more than justifies her sly embrace of
African-American cultural narcissism. Her critics seem to me quite anoth-
er matter, but my Editor’s Note is an appropriate context for commenting
upon them. Here I desire only to discuss, rather briefly, the genesis of Song
of Solomon’s authentic aesthetic strength from the creative agony with
Faulkner and with Ellison. Morrison deftly uses Faulkner while parrying
Ellison: out of the strong comes forth sweetness. Song of Solomon exuber-
antly is informed by the creative gusto of Morrison’s sense of victory in the
contest that is inevitable for the art of literature. Jacob Burckhardt and
Friedrich Nietzsche both pioneered in reminding us that the Athenians
conceived of literature as an agony. Nietzsche admirably condensed this
insight in his grand fragment, “Homer’s Contest”:

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting ... And just as the youths
were educated through contests, their educators were also
engaged in contests with each other. The great musical masters,
Pindar and Simonides, stood side by side, mistrustful and jealous;
in the spirit of contest. The sophist, the advanced teacher of antiq-
uity, meets another sophist; even the most universal type of
instruction, through the drama, was meted out to the people only
in the form of a tremendous wrestling among the great musical
and dramatic artists. How wonderful! “Even the artist hates the
artist.” Whereas modern man fears nothing in an artist more than
the emotion of any personal fight, the Greek knows the artist only
as engaged in a personal fight. Precisely where modern man senses
the weakness of a work of art, the Hellene seeks the source of its
greatest strength.

Probably Morrison would dissent from Nietzsche, but that would be


Morrison the critic, not Morrison the novelist, who is engaged in a per-
sonal fight with Invisible Man and with Faulkner’s Light in August.
Morrison’s career is still in progress; it is too soon to prophesy whether she
will yet surpass The Song of Solomon. Again, I am aware that admirers of
Beloved, a highly deliberate work of art, believe that Morrison has tran-
scended her earlier work. Since I find Beloved ideologically over-deter-
mined, and therefore in places somewhat tendentious, I prefer Song of
Solomon. Highly conscious as she is of the American romance tradition,
from Hawthorne and Melville through Faulkner and Ellison, Morrison
520 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

wonderfully subverts that tradition in Song of Solomon. This subversion is


not primarily ideological, but properly imaginative and revisionary. Great
solitaries—Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, Joe Christmas, Invisible Man—
are joined by a different kind of solitary, Milkman Dead. Milkman, like his
precursors, quests for the restoration of his true self, lest he remain a
Jonah, but Morrison shapes her protagonist’s quest so that it is communi-
tarian despite itself. She does the same in Beloved, yet with an inverted sen-
timentalism that may be the consequence of too overt a reliance upon the
political myth of a social energy inherent in the souls of Southern blacks.
In Song of Solomon, a work of more individual mythopoeia, the refining of
community is aesthetically persuasive.
Ellison’s nameless Invisible Man is massively persuasive in his final
judgment that there is no community for him, black or white:

Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you
step into chaos ... or imagination. That too I’ve learned in the cel-
lar, and not by deadening my sense of perception; I’m invisible,
not blind.

Morrison’s Milkman Dead reaches a conclusion radically revisionary of


Ellison’s nameless man:

How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and
beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the
recorded names were other names, just as “Macon Dead,” record-
ed for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of
people, places, and things. Names that had meaning ... When you
know your name, you should hang to it, for unless it is noted down
and remembered, it will die when you do.

The Invisible Man, who will accept no name whatsoever, has stepped
into chaos or imagination, two words for the same entity, or are they
antithesis? Ellison, as an Emersonian, allows for both readings. Morrison,
born Chloe Anthony Wofford, has held on to her original middle name as
the “real” one. Milkman loses the false name, “Dead,” to acquire the
ancestral real name, Solomon or Shalimar. Ellison perhaps would have
judged that Morrison had kept within narrower borders than she required;
I never discussed her work with him, so I do not know, but African-
American nationalism, or any sort, was what he had rejected in his
poignant and deluded Ras the Exhorter. Milkman’s superb poignance is
that he is anything but an Exhorter.
Novelists and Novels 521

Faulkner I find everywhere in Morrison, generally transmuted, yet


never finally transcended. In our century, Wallace Stevens wrote the
poems of our climate, and Faulkner wrote the best of our novels, particu-
larly in As I Lay Dying and Light in August. Returning to a fictive South,
Milkman also returns to Faulkner, primarily to The Bear and its rituals of
initiation. I dislike going against Morrison’s own passionate critical pro-
nouncements, yet I hardly am attempting “to place value only where that
influence is located.” Joseph Conrad does not crowd out Faulkner, nor
does Faulkner render Morrison less gifted, less black, less female, less
Marxist. Even the strongest of novelists cannot choose their own precur-
sors. Hemingway wanted to assert Huckleberry Finn as his origin, but the
ethos and mode of The Sun Also Rises are distinctly Conradian. “Africanism
is inextricable from the definition of Americanness,” Morrison insists. She
ought to be right, and as a nation we would be better if she were right. One
learns the truth about American Religion, I am convinced, if we trace its
origin to the early black Baptists in America, who carried an African gnosis
with them, in which “the little me within the big me” was the ultimate,
unfallen reality. Morrison, like Faulkner, has a great deal to teach us about
both “white” American and African-American identity. In a long enough
perspective, Faulkner and Morrison may be teaching the same troubled
truths.

Beloved

The cultural importance of Toni Morrison’s most popular novel, Beloved


(1987), hardly can be overstressed. I have just reread it, after a decade, in a
paperback printing numbered 41; in time doubtless there will be hundreds
of reprintings. Of all Morrison’s novels, it puzzles me most: the style is
remarkably adroit, baroque in its splendor, and the authority of the narra-
tive is firmly established. The characters are problematic, for me; unlike
the protagonists of Morrison’s earlier novels, they suggest ideograms. I
think that is because Beloved is a powerfully tendentious romance; it has too
clear a design upon its readers, of whatever race and gender. The story-
teller of Sula (1975) and of Song of Solomon (1977) has been replaced by a
formidable ideologue, who perhaps knows too well what she wishes her
book to accomplish.
Morrison strongly insists that her literary context is essentially African
American, and Beloved overtly invokes slave narratives as its precursors. I
hardly doubt that the novel’s stance is African-American feminist Marxist,
as most of the exegetes reprinted in this volume proclaim. And yet the style
and narrative procedures have more of a literary relationship to William
522 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Faulkner and Virginia Woolf than to any African-American writers. I am


aware that such an assertion risks going against Morrison’s own warning
“that finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American litera-
ture had value, provided the valued process does not become self-anoint-
ing.” I mildly observe (since both my personal and critical esteem for
Morrison is enormous) that “finding or imposing” (italics mine, of course)
is a very shrewd equivocation. Morrison, both in prose style and in narra-
tive mode, has a complex and permanent relationship to Faulkner and to
Woolf. Beloved, in a long perspective, is a child of Faulkner’s masterpiece,
As I Lay Dying, while the heroine, Sethe, has more in common with Lena
Grove of Light in August than with any female character of African-
American fiction. This is anything but a limitation, aesthetically consid-
ered, but is rejected by Morrison and her critical disciples alike. Ideology
aside, Morrison’s fierce assertion of independence is the norm for any
strong writer, but I do not think that this denial of a swerve from indu-
bitable literary origins can be a critical value in itself.
None of this would matter if the ideologies of political correctness
were not so deeply embedded in Beloved as to make Sethe a less persuasive
representation of an possible human being than she might have been.
Trauma has much less to do with Sethe’s more-than-Faulknerian sense of
guilt than the novel’s exegetes have argued. The guilt of being a survivor is
not unique to any oppressed people; programs in guilt are an almost uni-
versal temptation. Beloved is a calculated series of shocks; whether the
memory of shock is aesthetically persuasive has to seem secondary in a
novel dedicated to the innumerable victims of American slavery. One steps
very warily in raising the aesthetic issue in regard to a book whose moral
and social value is beyond dissent. Still, Sethe is a character in a visionary
romance that also insists upon its realistic and historical veracity. A literary
character has to be judged finally upon the basis of literary criteria, which
simply are not “patriarchal” or “capitalistic” or “Western imperialist.”
Morrison, whose earlier novels were not as over-determined by ideologi-
cal considerations as Beloved is, may have sacrificed much of her art upon
the altar of a politics perhaps admirable in itself, but not necessarily in the
service of high literature (if one is willing to grant that such an entity still
exists.)
The terrors depicted in Beloved may be beyond the capacity of literary
representation itself, which is an enigma that has crippled every attempt to
portray the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry. The African-American crit-
ic Stanley Crouch has been much condemned for expressing his disdain in
regard to Beloved. Crouch, I think, underestimated the book’s stylistic
achievement, but his healthy distrust of ideologies is, alas, germane to
Novelists and Novels 523

aspects of Beloved. Sentimentalism is not in one sense relevant to Beloved:


how can any emotion be in excess of its object when slavery is the object?
And yet the novel’s final passage about Sethe could prove, someday, to be
a kind of period piece:

He is staring at the quilt but he is thinking about her wrought-


iron back; the delicious mouth still puffy at the corner from Ella’s
fist. The mean black eyes. The wet dress steaming before the fire.
Her tenderness about his neck jewelry—its three wands, like
attentive baby rattlers, curving two feet into the air. How she
never mentioned or looked at it, so he did not have to feel the
shame of being collared like a beast. Only this woman Sethe could
have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next
to hers.
“Sethe,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than any-
body. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches
her face. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” His holding fin-
gers are holding hers.
“Me? Me?”

The pathos is admirable, rather too much so. Sethe is given the explic-
it tribute that the entire book as sought to constitute. She is the heroic
African-American mother, who has survived terrors both natural and
supernatural, and has maintained her integrity and her humanity.
Morrison’s design has been fulfilled, but is Sethe a person or an abstrac-
tion? Time will sift this matter out; cultural politics do not answer such a
question. Morrison must be judged finally, in Beloved, against As I Lay
Dying and Mrs. Dalloway, rather than against Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The canonical novelist of Song of Solomon
deserves no less.
N O V E L S
A N D

Philip Roth
N O V E L I S T S

(1933–)

The Zuckerman Tetralogy

PHILIP ROTH’S ZUCKERMAN BOUND BINDS TOGETHER THE GHOST WRITER,


Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, adding to them as epilogue a
wild short novel, The Prague Orgy, which is at once the bleakest and funni-
est writing Roth has done. The totality is certainly the novelist’s finest
achievement to date, eclipsing even his best single fictions, the exuberantly
notorious Portnoy’s Complaint, and the undervalued and ferocious My Life As
a Man. Zuckerman Bound is a classic apologia, an aggressive defense of Roth’s
moral stance as an author. Its cosmos derives candidly from the Freudian
interpretation as being unbearable. Roth knows that Freud and Kafka mark
the origins and limits of still-emerging literary culture, American and
Jewish, which has an uneasy relationship to normative Judaism and its wan-
ing culture. I suspect that Roth knows and accepts also what his surrogate,
Zuckerman, is sometimes too outraged to recognize: breaking a new road
both causes outrage in others, and demands payment in which the outra-
geous provoker punishes himself. Perhaps that is the Jewish version of
Emerson’s American Law and Compensation: nothing is got for nothing.
Zuckerman Bound merits something reasonably close to the highest
level of aesthetic praise for tragicomedy, partly because as a formal totality
it becomes much more than the sum of its parts. Those parts are surpris-
ingly diverse: The Ghost Writer is a Jamesonian parable of fictional influ-
ence, economical and shapely, beautifully modulated, while Zuckerman
Unbound is more characteristically Rothian, being freer in form and more
joyously expressionalistic in its diction. The Anatomy Lesson is a farce bor-
dering on fantasy, closer in mode and spirit to Nathanael West than is any-
thing else by Roth. With The Prague Orgy, Roth has transcended himself,

524
Novelists and Novels 525

or perhaps shown himself and others that, being just past fifty, he has
scarcely begun to display his powers. I have read nothing else in recent
American fiction that rivals Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Lot of 49 and
episodes like the story of Byron the light bulb in the same author’s
Gravity’s Rainbow. The Prague Orgy is of that disturbing eminence:
obscenely outrageous and yet brilliantly reflective of a paranoid reality
that has become universal. But the Rothian difference from Nathanael
West and Pynchon should also be emphasized. Roth paradoxically is still
engaged in moral prophecy; he continues to be outraged by the outra-
geous—in societies, others and himself. There is in him nothing of West’s
Gnostic preference for the posture of the Satanic editor, Shrike, in Miss
Lonelyhearts, or of Pynchon’s Kabbalistic doctrine of sado-anarchism.
Roth’s negative exuberance is not in the service of negative theology, but
intimates instead a nostalgia for the morality once engendered by the
Jewish normative tradition.
This is the harsh irony, obsessively exploited throughout Zuckerman
Bound, of the attack made upon Zuckerman’s Carnovsky (Roth’s Portnoy’s
Complaint) by the literary critic Milton Appel (Irving Howe). Zuckerman
has received a mortal wound from Appel, and Roth endeavors to com-
memorate the wound and the wounder, in the spirit of James Joyce per-
manently impaling the Irish poet, physician and general roustabout, Oliver
St. John Gogarty, as the immortally egregious Malachi (Buck) Mulligan of
Ulysses. There is plenty of literary precedent for settling scores in this way;
it is as old as Hellenistic Alexandria, and ass recent as Saul Bellow’s portrait
of Jack Ludwig as Valentine Gersbach in Herzog. Roth, characteristically
scrupulous, presents Appel as dignified, serious and sincere, and
Zuckerman as dangerously lunatic in this matter, but since the results are
endlessly hilarious, the revenge is sharp nevertheless.
Zuckerman Unbound makes clear, at least to me, that Roth indeed is a
Jewish writer in the sense that Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud are not,
and do not care to be. Bellow and Malamud, in their fiction, strive to be
North American Jewish only as Tolstoy was Russian, or Faulkner was
American Southern. Roth is certainly Jewish in his fiction, because his
absolute concern never ceases to be the pain of the relations between chil-
dren and parents, and between husband and wife, and in him this pain
invariably results from the incommensurability between rigorously moral
normative tradition whose expectations rarely can be satisfied, and the
reality of the way we live now. Zuckerman’s insane resentment of the mor-
alizing Milton Appel, and of even fiercer critics, is a deliberate self-parody
of Roth’s more-than-ironic reaction to how badly he has been read.
Against both Appel and the covens of maenads, Roth defends Zuckerman
526 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

(and so himself) as a kind of Talmudic Orpheus, by defining any man as


“clay with aspirations.”
What wins over the reader is that both defense and definition are con-
veyed by the highest humor now being written. The Anatomy Lesson and
The Prague Orgy, in particular, provoke a cleansing and continuous laugh-
ter, sometimes so intense that in itself it becomes astonishingly painful.
One of the many aesthetic gains of binding together the entire Zuckerman
ordeal (it cannot be called a saga) is to let the reader experience the grad-
ual acceleration of wit from the gentle Chekhovian wistfulness of The Ghost
Writer, on to the Gogolian sense of the ridiculous in Zuckerman Unbound,
and then the boisterous Westian farce of The Anatomy Lesson, only to end
in the merciless Kafkan irrealism of The Prague Orgy.
I will center most of what follows on The Prague Orgy, both because it
is the only part of Zuckerman Unbound that is new, and because it is the best
of Roth, a kind of coda to all his fiction so far. Haunting it necessarily is
the spirit of Kafka, a dangerous influence upon any writer, and particular-
ly dangerous, until now, for Roth. Witness his short novel, The Breast, his
major aesthetic disaster so far, surpassing such livelier failures as Our Gang
and The Great American Novel. Against the error of The Breast, can be set
the funniest pages in The Professor of Desire, where the great dream con-
cerning “Kafka’s whore” is clearly the imaginative prelude to The Prague
Orgy. David Kepesh, Roth’s Professor of Desire, falls asleep in Prague and
confronts “everything I ever hoped for,” a guided visit with an official
interpreter to an old woman, possibly once Kafka’s whore. The heart of her
revelation is Rothian rather than Kafkan, as she integrates the greatest
modern Jewish writers with all the other ghosts of her Jewish clientele:

“They were clean and they were gentlemen. As God is my witness,


they never beat on my backside. Even in bed they had manners.”
“But is there anything about Kafka in particular that she
remembers? I didn’t come here, to her, to Prague, to talk about
nice Jewish boys.”
She gives some thought to the question; or, more likely, no
thought. Just sits there trying out being dead.
“You see, he wasn’t so special,” she finally says. “I don’t mean
he wasn’t a gentleman. They were all gentlemen.”

This could be the quintessential Roth passage: the Jewish joke turned,
not against itself, nor against the Jews, and certainly not against Kafka, but
against history, against the way things were, and are, and yet will be.
Unlike the humor of Nathanael West (particularly in his The Dream Life of
Novelists and Novels 527

Balso Snell) and of Woody Allen, there is no trace of Jewish anti-Semitism


in Roth’s pained laughter. Roth’s wit uncannily follows the psychic pattern
set out by Freud in his late paper on “Humor” (1928), which speculates
that the superego allows jesting so as to speak some “kindly words of com-
fort to the intimidated ego.” The ego of poor Zuckerman is certainly
intimidated enough, and the reader rejoices at being allowed to share some
hilarious words of comfort with him.
When last we saw the afflicted Zuckerman, at the close of The Anatomy
Lesson, he had progressed (or regressed) from painfully lying back on his
play-mat, Roger’s Thesaurus propped beneath his head and four women
serving his many needs, to wandering the corridors of a university hospi-
tal, a patient playing at being an intern. A few years later, a physically
recovered Zuckerman is in Prague, as visiting literary lion, encountering
so paranoid a social reality that New York seems, by contrast, the forest of
Arden. Zuckerman, “the American authority on Jewish demons,” quests
for the unpublished Yiddish stories of the elder Sinovsky, perhaps mur-
dered by the Nazis. The exiled younger Sinovsky’s abandoned wife, Olga,
guards the manuscripts in Prague. In a deliberate parody of James’s “The
Aspern Papers,” Zuckerman needs somehow to seduce the alcoholic and
insatiable Olga into releasing stories supposedly worthy of Sholom
Aleichem of Isaac Babel, written in “the Yiddish of Flaubert.”
Being Zuckerman, he seduces no one and secures the Yiddish manu-
scripts anyway, only to have them confiscated by the Czech Minister of
Culture and his thugs, who proceed to expel “Zuckerman the Zionist
agent” back to “the little world around the corner” in New York City. In a
final scene subtler, sadder, and funnier than all previous Roth, the frustrat-
ed Zuckerman endures the moralizing of the Minister of Culture, who
attacks America for having forgotten that “masterpiece,” Betty
MacDonald’s The Egg and I. Associating himself with K., the hero of
Kafka’s The Castle, Zuckerman is furious at his expulsion, and utters a
lament for the more overt paranoia he must abandon:

... here where there’s no nonsense about purity and goodness, where
the division is not that easy to discern between the heroic and the
perverse, where every sort of repression foments a parody of free-
dom and the suffering of their historical misfortune engenders in its
imaginative victims these clownish forms of human despair.

That farewell-to-Prague has as its undersong: here where


Zuckerman is not an anomaly, but indeed a model of decorum and
restraint compared to anyone else who is at all interesting. Perhaps there
528 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

is another undertone: a farewell-to-Zuckerman on Roth’s part. The


author of Zuckerman Bound at last my have exorcised the afterglow of
Portnoy’s Complaint. There is an eloquent plea for release in The Anatomy
Lesson, where Zuckerman tries to renounce his fate as a writer:

It may look to outsiders like the life of freedom—not on a sched-


ule, in command of yourself, singled out for glory, the choice
apparently to write about anything. But once one’s writing, it’s all
limits. Bound to a subject. Bound to make a book of it...

Zuckerman bound, indeed, but bound in particular to the most ancient


of Covenants—that is Roth’s particular election, or self-election. In his
critical book, Reading Myself and Others (1975), the last and best essay,
“Looking at Kafka,” comments on the change that is manifested in Kafka’s
later fiction, observing that it is:

... touched by a spirit of personal reconciliation and sardonic self


acceptance, by a tolerance of one’s own brand of madness ... the
piercing masochistic irony ... has given way here to a critique of
the self and its preoccupations that, though bordering on mock-
ery, no longer seeks to resolve itself in images of the uttermost
humiliation and defeat.... Yet there is more here than a metaphor
for the insanely defended ego, whose striving for invulnerability
produces a defensive system that must in its turn become the
object of perpetual concern—there is also a very unromantic and
hardheaded fable about how and why art is made, a portrait of the
artist in all his ingenuity, anxiety, isolation, dissatisfaction, relent-
lessness, obsessiveness, secretiveness, paranoia, and self-addiction,
a portrait of the magical thinker at the end of his tether...

Roth intended this as commentary on Kafka’s “The Burrow.”


Eloquent and poignant, it is far more accurate as a descriptive prophecy of
Zuckerman Bound. Kafka resists nearly all interpretation, so that what most
needs interpretation in him is his evasion of interpretation. That Roth reads
himself into his precursor is a normal and healthy procedure in the liter-
ary struggle for self-identification. Unlike Kafka, Roth tries to evade, not
interpretation, but guilt, partly because he lives the truth of Kafka’s motto
of the penal colony: “Guilt is never to be doubted.” Roth has earned a per-
manent place in American literature by a comic genius that need never be
doubted again, wherever it chooses to take him next.
Novelists and Novels 529

Portnoy’s Complaint

After a full generation since it first appeared, Portnoy’s Complaint superbly


sustains rereading. Nothing of Roth’s has dwindled to a Period Piece, even
if Letting Go and When She Was Good now seem uncharacteristic for the
author of Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain. There
are fictions by Roth that never found me: Our Gang, The Breast, The Great
American Novel. From My Life as a Man (1974) to the present, Roth has
been an Old Master, but Portnoy’s Complaint remains the most vital of his
earlier works.
Vitality, in the Shakespearean or Falstaffian sense, and its representa-
tion in personality and character, is Roth’s greatest gift, which is why I
would nominate Sabbath’s Theater as his sublime achievement. It matters
that we see how astonishing a creation Sabbath’s Theater is. What are the
authentic eminences of American fiction in the second half of the
Twentieth century? My experience as an obsessive reader would center
first upon Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and
Mason & Dixon, to which one adds Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and
Don DeLillo’s Underworld. When I turn to Roth, I happily am deluged: the
tetralogy Zuckerman Bound; The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, and then the
American historical sequence that includes Sabbath’s Theater, American
Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. The sheer drive and
fecundity of this later Roth makes me think of Faulkner at his earlier splen-
dor: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom,
Absalom! Faulkner upon his heights is a frightening comparison to venture,
but Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral will sustain the contrast.
Nothing even by Roth has the uncanny originality of As I Lay Dying, yet
Sabbath’s Theater and the terrible pathos of American Pastoral have their
own uncanniness. The wildness and freedom of Portnoy’s Complaint now
seem very different when taken as a prelude to the advent of Sabbath’s
Theater, just over a quarter-century later.
Though the confrontation between the late Irving Howe and Roth
over Roth’s supposed self-hatred is pragmatically prehistoric (in 2003), it
has left some scars upon what ought to be called the novelist’s aesthetic
consciousness. In Shakespearean terms, Roth writes comedy or tragi-com-
edy, in the mode of the Problem Plays: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That
Ends Well, Measure for Measure. The exquisite rancidities of this
Shakespearean mode do not appear to be Roth’s object. He seems to pre-
fer Falstaff and Lear among Shakespeare’s characters, and both of them get
into Mickey Sabbath, who necessarily lacks the Falstaffian wit and Learian
grandeur. Sabbath is an heroic vitalist, but in retrospect what else is Alex
530 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

Portnoy? The comedy, painful to start with, hurts unbearably when you
reread Sabbath’s Theater. How hurtful is the hilarity of Portnoy’s Complaint?
My favorite Yiddish apothegm, since my childhood, I translate as:
“Sleep faster, we need the pillows.” Roth’s inescapability is that he has
usurped this mode, perhaps not forever, but certainly for the early twenty-
first century. Sleeping faster is a cure for the anguish of contamination: by
Jewish history; by Kafka; by one’s audience after achieving celebrity with
Portnoy’s Complaint.
Alex Portnoy is not going to age into Mickey Sabbath: Roth’s protag-
onists are neither Roth nor one another. But viewing Portnoy retrospec-
tively, through Sabbath’s outrageousness, allows readers to see what other-
wise we may be too dazzled or too overcome by laughter to realize. Alex
Portnoy, however mother-ridden, has an extraordinary potential for more
life that he is unlikely to fulfill. Not that fulfillment would be glorious or
redemptive; Sabbath’s grinding vitalism carries him past the edge of mad-
ness. Portnoy, liberal and humane (except, of course, in regard to women
he desires), calls himself “rich with rage”, but his fiercest anger is light
years away from Sabbath’s erotic fury.
Aside from Roth’s complex aesthetic maturation, the differences
between Portnoy and Sabbath is the shadow of Shakespeare, of King Lear’s
madness and Falstaff ’s refusal of embitterment and estrangement. Sabbath
is fighting for his life, within the limits of what he understands life to be:
the erotic, in all its ramifications. So intense is Sabbath that the denuncia-
tions directed at him are at once accurate and totally irrelevant, as here
from his friend, Norman:

“The walking panegyric for obscenity,” Norman said. “The


inverted saint whose message is desecration. Isn’t it tiresome in
1994, this role of rebel-hero? What an odd time to be thinking of
sex as rebellion. Are we back to Lawrence’s gamekeeper? At this
late hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the
virtues of fetishism and voyeurism. To be out with that belly of
yours, championing pornography and flying the flag of your prick.
What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are, Mickey Sabbath.
The discredited male polemic’s last gasp. Even as the bloodiest of
all centuries comes to an end, you’re out working day and night to
create an erotic scandal. You fucking relic, Mickey! You fifties
antique! Linda Lovelace is already light-years behind us, but you
persist in quarreling with society as though Eisenhower is presi-
dent!” But then, almost apologetically, he added, “The immensity
of your isolation is horrifying. That’s all I really mean to say.”
Novelists and Novels 531

“And there you’d be surprised,” Sabbath replied. “I don’t think


you ever gave isolation a real shot. It’s the best preparation I know
of for death.”

Roth has placed Sabbath near the outer limit of organized society: a
beggar, vagrant, and courter of death. It does not matter: Sabbath is
redeemed through sheer vitalism. Alex Portnoy now seems more a parody
of that frenetic drive. Portnoy’s Complaint is a marvelous comedy; Sabbath’s
Theater is a tragi-comedy, and its Shakespearean reverberations are legiti-
mate and persuasive.
N O V E L S
A N D

Cormac McCarthy
N O V E L I S T S

(1933–)

Blood Meridian

BLOOD MERIDIAN (1985) SEEMS TO ME THE AUTHENTIC AMERICAN APOCALYPTIC


novel, more relevant even in 2000 than it was fifteen years ago. The ful-
filled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood
Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville
and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even
Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian,
much as I appreciate Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman
Bound, Sabbath’s Theater, and American Pastoral, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself, in his recent Border trilo-
gy, commencing with the superb All the Pretty Horses, has not matched Blood
Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.
My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first
two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from
the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. The violence begins on
the novel’s second page, when the fifteen-year-old Kid is shot in the back
and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the
end, thirty years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in
all of American literature, murders the Kid in an outhouse. So appalling are
the continuous massacres and mutilations of Blood Meridian that one could
be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Kosovo in 1999.
Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian
is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a univer-
sal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare,
Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s
magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last

532
Novelists and Novels 533

transcends the violence, and convert goriness into terrifying art, an art
comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s. When I teach the book, many
of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends con-
tinue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined vio-
lence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust. But I cannot turn away
from Blood Meridian, now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be
read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the
Mexico–Texas borderlands in 1849–50, which is where and when most of
the novel is set. I suppose one could call Blood Meridian a “historical novel,”
since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous
paramilitary force sent out both by Mexican and Texan authorities to mur-
der and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of
historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and
nearly everywhere else, as we enter the third millennium. Judge Holden,
the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come.
Even as you learn to endure the slaughter McCarthy describes, you
become accustomed to the book’s high style, again as overtly
Shakespearean as it is Faulknerian. There are passages of Melvillean-
Faulknerian baroque richness and intensity in The Crying of Lot 49, and
elsewhere in Pynchon, but we can never be sure that they are not parodis-
tic. The prose of Blood Meridian soars, yet with its own economy, and its
dialogue is always persuasive, particularly when the uncanny Judge Holden
speaks (chapter 14, p. 199):

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his


inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it
are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be
mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dis-
pensation.
Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can
acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the
secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear.
Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of
his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the
thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have
taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that
he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Judge Holden is the spiritual leader of Glanton’s filibusters, and


McCarthy persuasively gives the self-styled judge a mythic status, appropriate
534 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

for a deep Machiavelli whose “thread of order” recalls Iago’s magic web, in
which Othello, Desdemona, and Cassio are caught. Though all of the
more colorful and murderous raiders are vividly characterized for us, the
killing-machine Glanton with the others, the novel turns always upon its
two central figures, Judge Holden and the Kid. We first meet the Judge on
page 6: an enormous man, bald as a stone, no trace of a beard, and eyes
without either brows or lashes. A seven-foot-tall albino, he almost seems
to have come from some other world, and we learn to wonder about the
Judge, who never sleeps, dances and fiddles with extraordinary art and
energy, rapes and murders little children of both sexes, and who says that
he will never die. By the book’s close, I have come to believe that the Judge
is immortal. And yet the Judge, while both more and less than human, is
as individuated as Iago or Macbeth, and is quite at home in the
Texan–Mexican borderlands where we watch him operate in 1849–50, and
then find him again in 1878, not a day older after twenty-eight years,
though the Kid, a sixteen-year-old at the start of Glanton’s foray, is forty-
five when murdered by the Judge at the end.
McCarthy subtly shows us the long, slow development of the Kid from
another mindless scalper of Indians to the courageous confronter of the
Judge in their final debate in a saloon. But though the Kid’s moral matu-
ration is heartening, his personality remains largely a cipher, as anonymous
as his lack of a name. The three glories of the book are the Judge, the land-
scape, and (dreadful to say this) the slaughters, which are aesthetically dis-
tanced by McCarthy in a number of complex ways.
What is the reader to make of the Judge? He is immortal as principle,
as War Everlasting, but is he a person, or something other? McCarthy will
not tell us, which is all the better, since the ambiguity is most stimulating.
Melville’s Captain Ahab, though a Promethean demigod, is necessarily
mortal, and perishes with the Pequod and all its crew, except for Ishmael.
After he has killed the Kid, Blood Meridian’s Ishmael, Judge Holden is the
last survivor of Glanton’s scalping crusade. Destroying the Native-
American nations of the Southwest is hardly analogous to the hunt to slay
Moby-Dick, and yet McCarthy gives us some curious parallels between the
two quests. The most striking is between Melville’s chapter 19, where a
ragged prophet, who calls himself Elijah, warns Ishmael and Queequeg
against sailing on the Pequod, and McCarthy’s chapter 4, where “an old dis-
ordered Mennonite” warns the Kid and his comrades not to join Captain
Worth’s filibuster, a disaster that preludes the greater catastrophe of
Glanton’s campaign.
McCarthy’s invocation of Moby-Dick, while impressive and suggestive,
in itself does not do much to illuminate Judge Holden for us. Ahab has his
Novelists and Novels 535

preternatural aspects, including his harpooner Fedellah and Parsee whale-


boat crew, and the captain’s conversion to their Zoroastrian faith. Elijah
tells Ishmael touches of other Ahabian mysteries: a three-day trance off
Cape Horn, slaying a Spaniard in front of a presumably Catholic altar in
Santa Ysabel, and a wholly enigmatic spitting into a “silver calabash.” Yet
all these are transparencies compared to the enigmas of Judge Holden,
who seems to judge the entire earth, and whose name suggests a holding,
presumably of sway over all he encounters. And yet, the Judge, unlike
Ahab, is not wholly fictive; like Glanton, he is a historic filibuster or free-
booter. McCarthy tells us most in the Kid’s dream visions of Judge Holden,
towards the close of the novel (chapter 22, pp. 309–10):

In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would
come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene.
Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than
their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into
his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his his-
tory through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand
at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus
or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the
dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will dis-
cover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his
commencing.

I think that McCarthy is warning his reader that the Judge is Moby-
Dick rather than Ahab. As another white enigma, the albino Judge, like the
albino whale, cannot be slain. Melville, a professed Gnostic, who believed
that some “anarch hand or cosmic blunder” had divided us into two fallen
sexes, gives us a Manichean quester in Ahab. McCarthy gives Judge
Holden the powers and purposes of the bad angels or demiurges that the
Gnostics called archons, but he tells us not to make such an identification
(as the critic Leo Daugherty eloquently has). Any “system,” including the
Gnostic one, will not divide the Judge back into his origins. The “ultimate
atavistic egg” will not be found. What can the reader do with the haunting
and terrifying Judge?
Let us begin by saying that Judge Holden, though his gladsome
prophecy of eternal war is authentically universal, is first and foremost a
Western American, no matter how cosmopolitan his background (he
speaks all languages, knows all arts and sciences, and can perform magical,
shamanistic metamorphoses). The Texan–Mexican border is a superb place
for a war-god like the Judge to be. He carries a rifle, mounted in silver,
536 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

with its name inscribed under the checkpiece: Et In Arcadia Ego. In the
American Arcadia, death is also always there, incarnated in the Judge’s
weapon, which never misses. If the American pastoral tradition essentially
is the Western film, then the Judge incarnates that tradition, though he
would require a director light-years beyond the late Sam Peckinpah, whose
The Wild Bunch portrays mildness itself when compared to Glanton’s para-
militaries. I resort though, as before, to Iago, who transfers war from the
camp and the field to every other locale, and is a pyromaniac setting every-
thing and everyone ablaze with the flame of battle. The Judge might be
Iago before Othello begins, when the war-god Othello was still worshipped
by his “honest” color officer, his ancient or ensign. The Judge speaks with
an authority that chills me even as Iago leaves me terrified:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the
authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of
divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another
within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore
forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a
forcing of the unity of existence.

If McCarthy does not want us to regard the Judge as a Gnostic archon


or supernatural being, the reader may still feel that it hardly seems suffi-
cient to designate Holden as a nineteenth-century Western American
Iago. Since Blood Meridian, like the much longer Moby-Dick, is more prose
epic than novel, the Glanton foray can seem a post-Homeric quest, where
the various heroes (or thugs) have a disguised god among them, which
appears to be the Judge’s Herculean role. The Glanton gang passes into a
sinister aesthetic glory at the close of chapter 13, when they progress from
murdering and scalping Indians to butchering the Mexicans who have
hired them:

They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the
blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted.
The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of
the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but
exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty
rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be
a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head.

I break into this passage, partly to observe that from this point on the
filibusters pursue the way down and out to an apocalyptic conclusion, but
Novelists and Novels 537

also to urge the reader to hear, and admire, the sublime sentence that fol-
lows directly, because we are at the visionary center of Blood Meridian.

They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El
Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they
had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatu-
ate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the
evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.

Since Cormac McCarthy’s language, like Melville’s and Faulkner’s, fre-


quently is deliberately archaic, the meridian of the title probably means the
zenith or noon position of the sun in the sky. Glanton, the Judge, the Kid, and
their fellows are not described as “tragic”—their long-suffering horses are—
and they are “infatuate” and half-mad (“fond”) because they have broken
away from any semblance of order. McCarthy knows, as does the reader, that
an “order” urging the destruction of the entire Native American population
of the Southwest is an obscene idea of order, but he wants the reader to know
also that the Glanton gang is now aware that they are unsponsored and free
to run totally amok. The sentence I have just quoted has a morally ambigu-
ous greatness to it, but that is the greatness of Blood Meridian, and indeed of
Homer and of Shakespeare. McCarthy so contextualizes the sentence that the
amazing contrast between its high gestures and the murderous thugs who
evoke the splendor is not ironic but tragic. The tragedy is ours, as readers, and
not the Glanton gang’s, since we are not going to mourn their demise except
for the Kid’s, and even there our reaction will be equivocal.
My passion for Blood Meridian is so fierce that I want to go on
expounding it, but the courageous reader should now be (I hope) pretty
well into the main movement of the book. I will confine myself here to the
final encounter between the preternatural Judge Holden and the Kid, who
had broken with the insane crusade twenty-eight years before, and now at
middle age must confront the ageless Judge. Their dialogue is the finest
achievement in this book of augmenting wonders, and may move the read-
er as nothing else in Blood Meridian does. I reread it perpetually and can-
not persuade myself that I have come to the end of it.
The Judge and the Kid drink together, after the avenging Judge tells
the Kid that this night his soul will be demanded of him. Knowing he is no
match for the Judge, the Kid nevertheless defies Holden, with laconic
replies playing against the Judge’s rolling grandiloquence. After demand-
ing to know where their slain comrades are, the Judge asks: “And where is
the fiddler and where the dance?”
538 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

I guess you can tell me.


I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility
called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanc-
tity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the
warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance
and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there
always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
You aint nothin.

To have known Judge Holden, to have seen him in full operation, and to tell
him that he is nothing, is heroic. “You speak truer than you know,” the Judge
replies, and two pages later murders the Kid, most horribly. Blood Meridian,
except for a one-paragraph epilogue, ends with the Judge triumphantly dancing
and fiddling at once, and proclaiming that he never sleeps and he will never die.
But McCarthy does not let Judge Holden have the last word.
The strangest passage in Blood Meridian, the epilogue is set at dawn,
where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he
makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man
strikes “the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” Around the man
are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the
holes, and then they move on. And that is all.
The subtitle of Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, which
belongs to the Judge, last survivor of the Glanton gang. Perhaps all that
the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in
the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in
the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new
Prometheus may be rising to go up against him.

All the Pretty Horses

If there is a pragmatic tradition of the American Sublime, then Cormac


McCarthy’s fictions are its culmination. Moby-Dick and Faulkner’s major,
early novels are McCarthy’s prime precursors. Melville’s Ahab fuses
together Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth—and
crosses them with a quest both Promethean and American. Even as
Montaigne’s Plato became Emerson’s, so Melville’s Shakespeare becomes
Cormac McCarthy’s. Though critics will go on associating McCarthy with
Faulkner, who certainly affected McCarthy’s style in Suttree (1979), the
visionary of Blood Meridian (1985) and The Border Trilogy (1992, 1994,
1998) has much less in common with Faulkner, and shares more pro-
foundly in Melville’s debt to Shakespeare.
Novelists and Novels 539

Melville, by giving us Ahab and Ishmael, took care to distance the


reader from Ahab, if not from his quest. McCarthy’s protagonists tend to
be apostles of the will-to-identity, except for the Iago-like Judge Holden of
Blood Meridian, who is the Will Incarnate. John Grady Cole, who survives
in All the Pretty Horses only to be destroyed in Cities of the Plain, is replaced
in The Crossing by Billy Parham, who is capable of learning what the hero-
ic Grady Cole evades, the knowledge that Jehovah (Yahweh) holds in his
very name: “Where that is I am not.” God will be present where and when
he chooses to be present, and absent more often than present.
The aesthetic achievement of All the Pretty Horses surpasses that of
Cities of the Plain, if only because McCarthy is too deeply invested in John
Grady Cole to let the young man (really still a boy) die with the proper dis-
tancing of authorial concern. No one will compose a rival to Blood
Meridian, not even McCarthy, but All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing are
of the eminence of Suttree. If I had to choose a narrative by McCarthy that
could stand on its own in relation to Blood Meridian, it probably would be
All the Pretty Horses. John Grady Cole quests for freedom, and discovers
what neither Suttree nor Billy Parham needs to discover, which is that
freedom in an American context is another name for solitude. The self ’s
freedom, for Cormac McCarthy, has no social aspect whatsoever.
I speak of McCarthy as visionary novelist, and not necessarily as a cit-
izen of El Paso, Texas. Emerson identified freedom with power, only avail-
able at the crossing, in the shooting of a gulf, a darting to an aim. Since we
care for Hamlet, even though he cares for none, we have to assume that
Shakespeare also had a considerable investment in Hamlet. The richest
aspect of All the Pretty Horses is that we learn to care strongly about the
development of John Grady Cole, and perhaps we can surmise that
Cormac McCarthy is also moved by this most sympathetic of his protago-
nists.
All the Pretty Horses was published seven years after Blood Meridian, and
is set almost a full century later in history. John Grady Cole is about the
same age as McCarthy would have been in 1948. There is no more an
identification between McCarthy and the young Cole, who evidently will
not live to see twenty, than there is between Shakespeare and Prince
Hamlet. And yet the reverberation of an heroic poignance is clearly heard
throughout All the Pretty Horses. It may be that McCarthy’s hard-won
authorial detachment toward the Kid in Blood Meridian had cost the nov-
elist too much, in the emotional register. Whether my surmise is accurate
or not, the reader shares with McCarthy an affectionate stance toward the
heroic youth at the center of All the Pretty Horses.
N O V E L S
A N D

Don DeLillo
N O V E L I S T S

(1936–)

IN DIFFERENT WAYS, I PREFER WHITE NOISE, LIBRA, AND UNDERWORLD TO


Mao II, but a crucial element of Don DeLillo’s achievement is his uncanny,
proleptic sense of the triumph of the Age of Terror, which is the peculiar
strength of Mao II. In 2002, Mao II is the way we live now, in the Age of
George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, and Osama bin Laden. One can venture
that character is irrelevant to DeLillo because he has a good claim to have
invented those clearly fictive personages: Dubya, Ashcroft, Osama. As for
plot, what relevance can it have in a cosmos where everything can turn out
to be part of a terror scheme. That may seem the anarcho-sadism of
Thomas Pynchon, whose earlier, paranoid visions were the prime precur-
sors of DeLillo. And yet Pynchonian paranoia was systematic; DeLillon
paranoia retains a random element, which probably has something to do
with the Romantic Transcendentalism that somehow lingers in DeLillo.
DeLillo is soft-spoken, without pretence, a man of good will. You
could not insert him into one of his novels, not even as Nick Shay in
Underworld. He is the antitype of Mao II’s Bill Gray, despite some superfi-
cial resemblances. Gray, like Pynchon, hides himself in order to write, but
dies as a witness to a new reality, in which the terrorist has usurped the nov-
elist. East Beirut, where the novel closes, is the New Everywhere.
A novel that begins in Yankee Stadium (sacred ground for DeLillo and
myself), with 6,500 couples simultaneously being married by the Reverend
Moon, ends with an East Beirut wedding escorted by a tank and jeep
mounted with a recoilless rifle. And all this would be routine, were it not
for the intimations of a pathos, almost a transcendence, that DeLillo
imparts to that final vision of marriage:

Civilians talking and laughing and well dressed, twenty adults and

540
Novelists and Novels 541

half as many children, mostly girls in pretty dresses and white


knee-stockings and patent-leather shoes. And here is the stunning
thing that takes her a moment to understand, that this is a wed-
ding party going by. The bride and groom carry champagne glass-
es and some of the girls hold sparklers that send off showers of
excited light. A guest in a pastel tuxedo smokes a long cigar and
does a dance around a shell hole, delighting the kids. The bride’s
gown is beautiful, with lacy appliqué at the bodice, and she looks
surprisingly alive, they all look transcendent, free of limits and
unsurprised to be here. They make it seem only natural that a
wedding might advance in resplendence with a free-lance tank as
escort. Sparklers going. Other children holding roses tissued in
fern. Brita is gripping the rail. She wants to dance or laugh or
jump off the balcony. It seems completely possible that she will
land softly among them and walk along in her pajama shirt and
panties all the way to heaven.

If there is a DeLillon counter-force to the Age of Terror, it must be


there: “they all look transcendent, free of limits.” We learn to recognize a
DeLillo scene from such near-epiphanies. Unlike most of his critics,
DeLillo has an Emersonian longing for the transcendental and extraordi-
nary, for privileged moments.
How permanent an achievement is Mao II, compared to Underworld?
Let it be affirmed at once that DeLillo does not write Period Pieces, as
Updike and Bellow go on doing. Bill Gray is a sad creation, and yet his aes-
thetic dignity is considerable. He is an authentic writer deeply fearful that
the new Time of Terror renders his art irrelevant. Samuel Beckett could
alter consciousness; Bill Gray knows that he cannot. Any bomb-thrower is
far more competent to modify our consciousness of reality.
It is disconcerting to reread Mao II just eleven years after its publica-
tion, and one year after the destruction of the World Trade Center. What
shocked us must have confirmed DeLillo in his anguished apprehension of
reality. Mao II in time may seem like secondary DeLillo, but it will lose its
wisdom only if someday we pass out of our unhappy time.

White Noise

Don DeLillo’s masterwork is Underworld (1997), which is long, uneven,


and wonderful. White Noise (1985) would appear to be his most popular
novel: the paperback in which I have just reread it is the thirty-first print-
ing. I doubt that it will prove as permanent as Underworld, but revisiting
542 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

clearly demonstrates that it is much more than a period piece. Critics fre-
quently associate DeLillo with William Gaddis and Robert Coover, as with
the formidable Thomas Pynchon. Underworld is something different, and
may have more affinities with Philip Roth than with Pynchon. DeLillo, in
White Noise, is a High Romantic in the age of virtual reality and related
irrealisms. Frank Lentricchia, who has become DeLillo’s canonical critic,
is accurate in suggesting that Jack Gladney descends from Joyce’s Poldy
Bloom, and like Poldy, DeLillo’s protagonist has a touch of the poet about
him. One large difference is that Gladney is a first-person narrator; anoth-
er is that Poldy has a benign immensity that Gladney cannot match.
Though another cuckold, Poldy is a Romantic individualist, like Joyce
himself. A century later, the amiable Gladney is trapped in a network of
systems, another unit in the Age of Information.
DeLillo is a comedian of the spirit, haunted by omens of the end of
our time. White Noise is very funny, and very disturbing: it is another of the
American comic apocalypses that include Mark Twain’s The Mysterious
Stranger, Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, Nathaniel West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. That is a high order of
company, and White Noise almost sustains it.
DeLillo is a master of deadpan outrageousness: Jack Gladney is chair-
man and professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill. Though
he is the American inventor of his discipline, Gladney has no affective
reaction to Hitler: it appears to be a subject like any other these days, be it
Eskimo Lesbian Studies or Post-Colonialism.
But all of White Noise is comic outrage; everything becomes funny, be
it the fear of death, adultery, airborne toxic events, the struggles of the
family romance, advanced supermarkets, or what you will. Simultaneously,
everything becomes anxious, in a world where even the nuns only pretend
to believe, and where the first three of Gladney’s four wives each had some
connection to the world of espionage.
Until Underworld, DeLillo’s characters are curious blends of personal-
ities and ideograms. Gladney is such a blend: we are persuaded by his love
for Babette, his adulterous but well-meaning wife, and by his warm rela-
tions with his rather varied children. And yet he is as just as much Fear-of-
Death as he is a husband and a father.
Where is DeLillo in White Noise? Close to the end of the book, he gives
us a long paragraph of astonishing power and distinction, one of the most
memorable passages in American writing of the later twentieth century:

We go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder and I. We take


a thermos of iced tea, park the car, watch the setting sun. Clouds
Novelists and Novels 543

are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap the shape of


light. Heavy overcasts have little effect. Light bursts through,
tracers and smoky arcs. Overcasts enhance the mood. We find lit-
tle to say to each other. More cars arrive, parking in a line that
extends down to the residential zone. People walk up the incline
and onto the overpass, carrying fruit and nuts, cool drinks, main-
ly the middle-aged, the elderly, some with webbed beach chairs
which they set out on the sidewalk, but younger couples also, arm
in arm at the rail, looking west. The sky takes on content, feeling,
an exalted narrative life. The bands of color reach so high, seem
at times to separate into their constituent parts. There are turret-
ed skies, light storms, softly falling streamers. It is hard to know
how we should feel about this. Some people are scared by the sun-
sets, some determined to be elated, but most of us don’t know how
to feel, are ready to go either way. Rain is no deterrent. Rain
brings on graded displays, wonderful running hues. More cars
arrive, people come trudging up the incline. The spirit of these
warm evenings is hard to describe. There is anticipation in the air
but it is not the expectant midsummer hum of a shirtsleeve crowd,
a sandlot game, with coherent precedents, a history of secure
response. The waiting is introverted, uneven, almost backward
and shy, tending toward silence. What else do we feel? Certainly
there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe,
but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread,
we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t
know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we
will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be
absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass. The
collapsible chairs are yanked open, the old people sit. What is
there to say? The sunsets linger and so do we. The sky is under a
spell, powerful and storied. Now and then a car actually crosses
the overpass, moving slowly, deferentially. People keep coming up
the incline, some in wheelchairs, twisted by disease, those who
attend them bending low to push against the grade. I didn’t know
how many handicapped and helpless people there were in town
until the warm nights brought crowds to the overpass. Cars speed
beneath us, coming from the west, from out of the towering light,
and we watch them as if for a sign, as if they carry on their paint-
ed surfaces some residue of the sunset, a barely detectable luster
or film of telltale dust. No one plays a radio or speaks in a voice
that is much above a whisper. Something golden falls, a softness
544 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

delivered to the air. There are people walking dogs, there are kids
on bikes, a man with a camera and long lens, waiting for his
moment. It is not until some time after dark has fallen, the insects
screaming in the heat, that we slowly begin to disperse, shyly,
politely, car after car, restored to our separate and defensible
selves.

It is a major American prose-poem, marked by the aura of the airborne


toxic event, and yet balanced upon the edge of a transcendental revelation.
DeLillo, who is so easily mistaken for a Post-Modernist End-Gamer, is rather
clearly a visionary, a late Emersonian American Romantic, like the Wallace
Stevens who turns blankly on the sand in The Auroras of Autumn. Light bursts
through, and the sky, as in Stevens, takes on an exalted narrative life. Awe
transcends fear, transcends the past of awe. Is it wonder or dread, an epiphany
or mere, reductive pollution? What matters is that brightness falls from the
air, before all the viewers return to their separate selves.
This is more than Transcendentalism in the last ditch, or Romanticism
on the wane. Nothing is affirmed, not even illusion. We turn to DeLillo
for woe and wonder alike, accurately persuaded of his high artistry, of
something well beyond a study of the nostalgias.

Underworld

One can venture that the major American novelists now at work are
Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy.
They write the Style of our Age, and each has composed canonical works.
For DeLillo, I would name these as White Noise, Libra, and Underworld,
certainly his principal book up to this time. Roth, immensely prolific,
wrote his masterpiece in the scabrous Sabbath’s Theater, while his tetralo-
gy, Zuckerman Bound, and American Pastoral are equally likely to survive our
era. McCarthy’s Blood Meridian continues to overwhelm me: Suttree before
it, All the Pretty Horses more recently, also should be permanent. Pynchon,
named by Tony Tanner as DeLillo’s precursor, is an central to our narra-
tive fiction now as John Ashbery is to our poetry. The Crying of Lot 49 and
Gravity’s Rainbow have defined our culture—to call it that—and Mason &
Dixon is even more remarkable, a work of amazing geniality and a kind of
hopeless hope.
If just four recent fictions are to be selected for the United States in
the early years of the twenty-first century, then name them as Blood
Meridian, Sabbath’s Theater, Mason & Dixon, and Underworld. All of DeLillo
is in Underworld, and so is New York City 1951–96. He has not written the
Novelists and Novels 545

epic of the city; perhaps Hart Crane did that forever, with The Bridge
(1930). But DeLillo’s sense of America, in the second half of the twentieth
century, is achieved perfectly in Underworld.
DeLillo, a wisdom writer, makes no Hemingwayesque attempt to chal-
lenge Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Nor does he desire any contest with Pynchon,
though Tony Tanner shrewdly implies that this was unavoidable. Pynchon’s
cosmos of paranoia, indispensable waste, plastic consumerism is the literary
context of Underworld. DeLillo is highly aware of his own belatedness, yet his
resources are extraordinary, and he so subsumes Pynchon so as to achieve a
distinguished triumph over any anguish of contamination that might have
impeded Underworld. By the time the vast book concludes, DeLillo’s relation
to Pynchon is like Pynchon’s own relation to The Recognitions of William
Gaddis and to Borges. The Pynchon–DeLillo implicit contest becomes akin
to Blood Meridian’s struggle with Melville and Faulkner or Roth’s permanent
status as Franz Kafka’s grandnephew (as it were).
Tanner, disappointed with Underworld, argued otherwise, and some-
times cannot be refuted. I wince when Tanner observes: “And, crucially,
Underworld has no Tristero.” Tristero remains the greatest of Pynchonian
inventions: The Crying of Lot 49’s sublimely mad, subversive alternative to
the United States Postal Service is not matched by Gravity’s Rainbow’s
interplay between the System and the Zone. Nor, as Tanner insists, does
Underworld have so persuasive a universal connection to justify its declara-
tions that everything is linked and connected. But again, DeLillo knows
this and makes of his supposed weakness a radical strength.
Tanner is again accurate when he observes that Nick Shay, DeLillo’s
surrogate, as a character is just not there at all, nor does Shay want to be.
The only character with a consciousness before Mason and Dixon, any-
where in Pynchon, is Oedipa Maas, and she is there only in the closing
moments of the novella. The only consciousness in DeLillo is DeLillo;
despite his supposed Post-Modernism, he is a High Romantic
Transcendentalist determined not to be out of his time. If there is religios-
ity in Underworld, it is not DeLillo’s and is portrayed as part of the waste.
And yet there is something more profound than mere nostalgia in
DeLillo’s Romanticism. His authentic masters are Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman, and his visions, flashing out against the noise and the waste, are
enduring illuminations.
At the opening of “Self-Reliance,” Emerson gave us a superb irony:

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts:


they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
546 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

DeLillo lovingly parodies this in Nick Shay’s final meditation:

Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities


of the things we use and discard. Look how they come back to us,
alight with a kind of brave aging.

Tanner was anxious about the epiphanies of DeLillo’s urban transcen-


dentalism, and wondered if they were only evidences of a decayed
Catholicism. And yet, DeLillo’s vibrant Emersonianism seems to me clear
enough. Underworld, which Tanner says is totally reliant on history, actual-
ly is self-reliant and like Emerson is adversarial to history. Old Bronx boy
and baseball fan that I am (like DeLillo, addicted to the Yankees), I thrill
to the Prologue of Underworld, which I wish had kept its title of “Pafko at
the Wall.” Though you could say that DeLillo is following baseball history
in his vision of Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World in
October 1951, I myself have strong memories of that moment at the old
Polo Grounds, and what I recall is mere history, and “it is all falling indeli-
bly into the past.” Romantic vision of the high mode, whether in Song of
Myself or Underworld, is precisely what does not fall.
N O V E L I S T S
Thomas Pynchon

A N D
(1937–)

N O V E L S
I SUPPOSE THAT PYNCHON’S MASTERWORK, TO DATE, IS MASON & DIXON,
but my personal passion for The Crying of Lot 49 is too strong to yield to
any other book. Visionary romance is the genre of The Crying of Lot 49.
The book seems like a lot of other things: detective story turned inside out,
social satire, American apocalypse, but essentially it is romance, a narrative
that so meshes fantasy and American reality that they cannot be disen-
gaged. Its protagonist, Oedipa, is amiable but persuasive neither as person-
ality nor as character. She doesn’t have to be. After thirty-six years, The
Crying of Lot 49 is perfectly revelatory of current American paranoia in the
Age of George W. Bush.
Since the United States, at this time, looks to me like a disorganized
paranoia (though such mighty archons as Ashcroft and Poindexter labor to
organize it), one feels that it ought to engender an opposing force like the
Tristero, an underground postal system that is something of an alternative
culture. There cannot, in our America, be any alternative cultures because
Dubya, the entertainment industry, the universities, the media, all have sub-
sumed one another. The Tristero, sublimely paranoid, is too different to be
absorbed. It will not go to war with Iraq, it will not vote, it will not pay taxes
or postal fees. It is what Pynchon elsewhere terms sado-anarchism.
As such, it is a parody of Pentecostalism; The Crying of Lot 49 is neither
political nor religious in its stance. But it is very concerned with the United
States of America: is the Tristero system an anarchist alternative to
America? Pynchon answers no questions, but something in Oedipa’s final
meditation may constitute an implicit answer:

Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either


Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero.

547
548 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the
legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just
America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and
manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed,
assumed full circle into some paranoia.

This marvelously intricate passage comes down to a grim choice of


realities: paranoia or sado-anarchism. I wake up these mornings, drink tea,
and stare at (I cannot quite read it) The New York Times, which clearly is
paranoid. The first page (Monday, November 25, 2002) tells me about a
young female evangelist murdered in Lebanon, and imparts the news
(which is no news) that the middle class in Dubya’s paranoia are losing
their health benefits. Further down, there is a story about whether or not
women will join a golf club. And so it goes. There had better be a Tristero,
at least in our imaginations.

Gravity’s Rainbow

We all carry about with us our personal catalog of the experiences that
matter most—our own versions of what they used to call the Sublime. So
far as aesthetic experience in twentieth-century America is concerned, I
myself have a short list for the American Sublime: the war that concludes
the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup; Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; Wallace Stevens’s
“The Auroras of Autumn”; nearly all of Hart Crane; Charlie Parker play-
ing “Parker’s Mood” and “I Remember You”; Bud Powell performing “Un
Poco Loco”; Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts; and most recently, the
story of Byron the light bulb in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I am not suggesting that there is not much more of the Sublime in
Gravity’s Rainbow than the not quite eight pages that make up the story of
Byron the Bulb. Pynchon is the greatest master of the negative Sublime at
least since Faulkner and West, and if nothing besides Byron the Bulb in
Gravity’s Rainbow seems to me quite as perfect as all of The Crying of Lot 49,
that may be because no one could hope to write the first authentic post-
Holocaust novel and achieve a total vision without fearful cost. Yet the
story of Byron the Bulb, for me, touches one of the limits of art, and I want
to read it very closely here, so as to suggest what is most vital and least
problematic about Pynchon’s achievement as a writer, indeed as the crucial
American writer of prose fiction at the present time. We are now, in my
judgment, in the Age of John Ashbery and of Thomas Pynchon, which is
not to suggest any inadequacy in such marvelous works as James Merrill’s
The Changing Light at Sandover or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Bound but only
Novelists and Novels 549

to indicate one critic’s conviction as to what now constitutes the Spirit of


the Age.
For Pynchon, ours is the age of plastics and paranoia, dominated by
the System. No one is going to dispute such a conviction; reading the New
York Times first thing every morning is sufficient to convince one that not
even Pynchon’s imagination can match journalistic irreality. What is more
startling about Pynchon is that he has found ways of representing the
impulse to defy the System, even though both the impulse and its repre-
sentations always are defeated. In the Zone (which is our cosmos as the
Gnostics saw it, the kenoma or Great Emptiness) the force of the System,
of They (whom the Gnostics called the Archons) is in some sense irre-
sistible, as all overdetermination must be irresistible. Yet there is a
Counterforce, hardly distinguished in its efficacy, but it never does (or can)
give up. Unfortunately, its hero is the extraordinarily ordinary Tyrone
Slothrop, who is a perpetual disaster, and whose ultimate fate, being “scat-
tered” (rather in the biblical sense), is accomplished by Pynchon with dis-
maying literalness. And yet—Slothrop, who has not inspired much affec-
tion even in Pynchon’s best critics, remains more hero than antihero,
despite the critics, and despite Pynchon himself.
There are more than four hundred named characters in Gravity’s
Rainbow, and perhaps twenty of these have something we might want to
call personality, but only Tyrone Slothrop (however negatively) could be
judged a self-representation (however involuntary) on the author’s part.
Slothrop is a Kabbalistic version of Pynchon himself, rather in the way that
Scythrop the poet in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey is inten-
tionally a loving satire upon Peacock’s friend the poet Shelley, but
Kabbalistically is a representation of Peacock himself. I am not interested
in adding Nightmare Abbey to the maddening catalog of “sources” for
Gravity’s Rainbow (though Slothrop’s very name probably alludes to
Scythrop’s, with the image of a giant sloth replacing the acuity of the
Shelleyan scythe). What does concern me is the Kabbalistic winding path
that is Pynchon’s authentic and Gnostic image for the route through the
kelippot or evil husks that the light must take if it is to survive in the ulti-
mate breaking of the vessels, the Holocaust brought about by the System
at its most evil, yet hardly at its most prevalent.
The not unimpressive polemic of Norman Mailer—that Fascism
always lurks where plastic dominates—is in Pynchon not a polemic but a
total vision. Mailer, for all his legitimate status as Representative Man, lacks
invention except in Ancient Evenings, and there he cannot discipline his
inventiveness. Pynchon surpasses every American writer since Faulkner at
invention, which Dr. Samuel Johnson, greatest of Western literary critics,
550 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

rightly considered to be the essence of poetry or fiction. What can be


judged Pynchon’s greatest talent is his vast control, a preternatural ability
to order so immense an exuberance at invention. Pynchon’s supreme aes-
thetic quality is what Hazlitt called gusto, or what Blake intended in his
Infernal proverb: “Exuberance is Beauty.”
Sadly, that is precisely what the Counterforce lacks: gusto. Slothrop
never gives up; always defeated, he goes on, bloody and bowed, but has to
yield to entropy, to a dread scattering. Yet he lacks all exuberance; he is the
American as conditioned reflex, colorless and hapless.
Nothing holds or could hold Gravity’s Rainbow together—except
Slothrop. When he is finally scattered, the book stops, and the apocalyptic
rocket blasts off. Still, Slothrop is more than a Derridean dissemination, if
only because he does enable Pynchon to gather together seven hundred
and sixty pages. Nor is Gravity’s Rainbow what is now called “a text.” It is a
novel, with a beginning, an end, and a monstrous conglomerate of middles.
This could not be if the schlemiel Slothrop were wholly antipathetic.
Instead, he does enlist something crucial in the elitest reader, a something
that is scattered when the hero, poor Plasticman or Rocketman, is apoca-
lyptically scattered.
Pynchon, as Richard Poirier has best seen and said, is a weird blend of
the esoteric and insanely learned with the popular or the supposedly pop-
ular. Or, to follow Pynchon’s own lead, he is a Kabbalistic writer, esoteric
not only in his theosophical allusiveness (like Yeats) but actually in his
deeper patterns (like Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano). A Kabbalistic
novel is something beyond an oxymoron not because the Kabbalah does
not tell stories (it does) but because its stories are all exegetical, however
wild and mythical. That does give a useful clue for reading Pynchon, who
always seems not so much to be telling his bewildering, labyrinthine story
as writing a wistful commentary upon it as a story already twice-told,
though it hasn’t been, and truly can’t be told at all.

II

That returns us to Byron the Bulb, whose story can’t be told because
poor Byron the indomitable really is immortal. He can never burn out,
which at least is an annoyance for the whole paranoid System, and at most
is an embarrassment for them. They cannot compel Byron to submit to the
law of entropy, or the death drive, and yet they can deny him any context
in which his immortality will at last be anything but a provocation to his
own madness. A living reminder that the System can never quite win, poor
Byron the Bulb becomes a death-in-life reminder that the System also can
Novelists and Novels 551

never quite lose. Byron, unlike Slothrop, cannot be scattered, but his high
consciousness represents the dark fate of the Gnosis in Pynchon’s vision.
For all its negativity, Gnosticism remains a mode of transcendental belief.
Pynchon’s is a Gnosis without transcendence. There is a Counterforce, but
there is no fathering and mothering abyss to which it can return.
And yet the light bulb is named Byron, and is a source of light and can-
not burn out. Why Byron? Well, he could hardly be Goethe the Bulb or
Wordsworth the Bulb or even Joyce the Bulb. There must be the insou-
ciance of personal myth in his name. Probably he could have been Oscar
the Bulb, after the author of The Importance of Being Earnest or of that mar-
velous fairy tale “The Remarkable Rocket.” Or perhaps he might have
been Groucho the Bulb. But Byron the Bulb is best, and not merely for
ironic purposes. Humiliated but immortal, this Byron, too, might pro-
claim:

But there is that within me which shall tire


Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre.

Byron the Bulb is essentially Childe Harold in the Zone:

He would not yield dominion of his mind


To spirits against whom his own rebell’d.

Like Childe Harold, Byron the Bulb is condemned to the fate of all
High-Romantic Prometheans:

there is a fire
And motion of the soul which will not dwell
In its own narrow being, but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire;
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore,
Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire
Of aught but rest; a fever at the core,
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.

There are, alas, no high adventures for Byron the Bulb. We see him
first in the Bulb Baby Heaven, maintained by the System or Company as
part of its business of fostering demiurgic illusions:
552 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of pro-
viding the appearance of power, power against the night, without
the reality.

From the start, Byron is an anomaly, attempting to recruit the other


Baby Bulbs in his great crusade against the Company. His is already a voice
in the Zone, since he is as old as time.

Trouble with Byron’s he’s an old, old soul, trapped inside the glass
prison of a Baby Bulb.

Like the noble Lord Byron plotting to lead the Greeks in their
Revolution against the Turks, Byron the Bulb has his High-Romantic
vision:

When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet Byron’s elated.
He has passed the time hatching some really insane grandiose
plans—he’s gonna organize all the Bulbs, see, get him a power
base in Berlin, he’s already hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do
is develop the knack (Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate
close to the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually
trigger an epileptic fit! True. Byron has had a vision against the
rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs, all over Europe, at a given
synchronizing pulse arranged by one of his many agents in the
Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to strobe together, humans thrash-
ing around the 20 million rooms like fish on the beaches of
Perfect Energy—Attention, humans, this has been a warning to
you. Next time, a few of us will explode. Ha-ha. Yes we’ll unleash
our Kamikaze squads! You’ve heard of the Kirghiz Light? well
that’s the ass end of a firefly compared to what we’re gonna—oh,
you haven’t heard of the—oh, well, too bad. Cause a few Bulbs,
say a million, a mere 5% of our number, are more than willing to
flame out in one grand burst instead of patiently waiting out their
design hours.... So Byron dreams of his Guerrilla Strike Force,
gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in
the face with one coordinated blast.

The rhetoric of bravado here is tempered and defeated by a rhetoric


of desperation. A rude awakening awaits Byron, because the System has in
place already its branch, “Phoebus,” the international light-bulb cartel,
headquartered of course in Switzerland. Phoebus, god of light and of
Novelists and Novels 553

pestilence “determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world,”
and yet does not as yet know that Byron, rebel against the cartel’s repression,
is immortal. As an immortal, bearer of the Gnostic Spark or pneuma, Byron
must acquire knowledge, initially the sadness of the knowledge of love:

One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, and are
gone. The first few of these hit Byron hard. He’s still a new arrival,
still hasn’t accepted his immortality. But on through the burning
hours he starts to learn about the transience of others: learns that
loving them while they’re here becomes easier, and also more
intense—to love as if each design-hour will be the last. Byron soon
enough becomes a Permanent Old-Timer. Others can recognize
his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed except in a gen-
eral way, when folklore comes flickering in from other parts of the
Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist’s study in Lyons
who’s supposed to know magic, another in Norway outside a
warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly
bulbs begin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other
Immortals are out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence with
much, perhaps, everything, in it.

A silence that may have everything in it is a Gnostic concept but falls


away into the silence of impotence, on the part of the other bulbs, when
the System eventually sends its agent to unscrew Byron:

At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin agent is sent


out to the opium den to transfer Byron. She is wearing asbestos-
lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike heels, no not so she can fit
in with the crowd, but so that she can reach that sconce to
unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror.
The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the
speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black
Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer
matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in
Europe knows what’s happened. They are silent with impotence,
with surrender in the face of struggles they thought were all myth.
We can’t help, this common thought humming through pastures of
sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling
piers in the North, there’s never been anything we could do.... Anyone
shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on
Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do
554 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

protest, maybe, here and there, but it’s only information, glow-
modulated, harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces
of the powerful that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby
ward, in his innocence.

Romantics are Incandescent Anomalies, a phrase wholly appropriate


to John Ashbery’s belated self-illuminations also, defeated epiphanies that
always ask the question: Was it information? The information that
Pynchon gives us has Byron taken to a “control point,” where he burns on
until the committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man after him.
Like the noble Lord Byron, who was more than half in love with easeful
death before he went off to die in Greece, Byron the Bulb is now content
to be recycled also, but he is bound upon his own wheel of fire, and so must
continue as a now involuntary prophet and hero:

But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The plan is to
smash up Byron and send him back right there in the shop to cul-
let and batch—salvage the tungsten, of course—and let him be
reincarnated in the glassblower’s next project (a balloon setting
out on a journey from the top of a white skyscraper). This would-
n’t be too bad a deal for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus does
how many hours he has on him. Here in the shop he’s watched
enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool from
which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and wouldn’t mind
going through it himself. But he is trapped on the Karmic wheel.
The glowing orange batch is a taunt, a cruelty. There’s no escape
for Byron, he’s doomed to an infinite regress of sockets and bulb-
snatchers. In zips young Hansel Geschwindig, a Weimar street
urchin—twirls Byron out of the ceiling into a careful pocket and
Gesssschhhhwindig! out the door again. Darkness invades the
dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams
grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the worst.
Light, in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, mortal hope. As
the contacts break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the
glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying, “Who? Who?”

Byron the Bulb’s Promethean fire is now a taunt and a cruelty. A mad
comedy, “an infinite regress of sockets and bulbsnatchers,” will be the poor
Bulb’s destiny, a repetition-compulsion akin to the entropic flight and scat-
tering of the heroic schlemiel Slothrop. The stone-faced search parties of
the Phoebus combine move out into the streets of Berlin. But Byron is off
Novelists and Novels 555

upon his unwilling travels: Berlin to Hamburg to Helgoland to Nürnberg,


until (after many narrow escapes):

He is scavenged next day (the field now deathempty, columned,


pale, streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds lengthening
behind the gilded swastika and wreath) by a poor Jewish ragpick-
er, and taken on, on into another 15 years of preservation against
chance and against Phoebus. He will be screwed into mother
(Mutter) after mother, as the female threads of German light-bulb
sockets are known, for some reason that escapes everybody.

Can we surmise the reason? The cartel gives up, and decides to declare
Byron legally burned out, a declaration that deceives nobody.

Through his years of survival, all these various rescues of Byron


happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any
bulbs nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the need for sol-
idarity against the cartel. He has come to see how Bulb must move
beyond its role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has
restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequen-
cies, above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb
can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets,
for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate
among the dreams of men.” Some bulbs listened attentively—oth-
ers thought of ways to fink to Phoebus. Some of the older anti-
Byronists were able to fool with their parameters in systematic
ways that would show up on the ebonite meters under the Swiss
mountain: there were even a few self-immolations, hoping to draw
the hit men down.

This darkness of vain treachery helps to flesh out the reason for
Byron’s survival. Call it the necessity of myth, or of gossip aging produc-
tively into myth. Not that Phoebus loses any part of its profit; rather, it
establishes a subtler and more intricate international cartel pattern:

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He


learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances,
in homes, in factories and out in the streets. Each has something
to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the
earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander
and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he
556 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His


youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem
impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be over-
heard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line.
Prophets traditionally don’t last long—they are either killed out-
right, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and
think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been
visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever,
knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer
will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will
grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb,
enjoying it.

This seems to me the saddest paragraph in all of Pynchon; at least, it


hurts me the most. In it is Pynchon’s despair of his own Gnostic Kabbalah,
since Byron the Bulb does achieve the Gnosis, complete knowledge, but
purchases that knowledge by impotence, the loss of power. Byron can nei-
ther be martyred, nor betray his own prophetic vocation. What remains is
madness: limitless rage and frustration, which at last he learns to enjoy.
That ends the story of Byron the Bulb, and ends something in
Pynchon also. What is left—whether in Gravity’s Rainbow or in the
immense work-in-progress, a historical novel depicting the coming-on of
the American Civil War and reported to have the title The Mason-Dixon
Line—is the studying of new modalities of post-Apocalyptic silence.
Pynchon seems now to be where his precursor Emerson prophesied the
American visionary must be:

There may be two or three or four steps, according to the genius


of each, but for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts,—
I and the Abyss.

If at best, the I is an immortal but hapless light bulb and the Abyss, our
Gnostic foremother and forefather, is the socket into which that poor I of
a bulb is screwed, then the two absorbing facts themselves have ceased to
absorb.
N O V E L I S T S
Paul Auster

A N D
(1947–)

N O V E L S
The New York Trilogy

REREADING AUSTER’S NEW YORK TRILOGY IS FOR ME, AN ODD EXPERIENCE,


if only because I never can decide how to regard these three spare, refined
narratives. Auster can seem a French novelist who writes in American
English, but his American literary culture is extensive and finally decisive.
He acknowledges Kafka and Beckett as his masters, while finding
Cervantes to be his imaginative ideal. The curious version of “detective
stories” that determines the shape of the Trilogy is more in the mode of
Borges (itself Kafkan) than in that of the hard-boiled genre of Raymond
Chandler and his followers. If there is an American counter-tradition that
turns the detective stories of Poe inside out, its chief practitioners are
Hawthorne and Melville, the principal narrative writers of the Age of
Emerson and Walt Whitman.
Auster can be said to cross Hawthorne with Kafka, as Borges did. The
Argentine fabulist remarked that his favorite story was Hawthorne’s
“Wakefield”, an altogether Austerian tale. Wakefield vanishes from home
and marriage, but only to establish residence a few streets away. After a
considerable interval, he returns to his life, in a reunion as inexplicable as
his withdrawal. Auster, a more considerable poet in prose than in verse, is
perhaps less a novelist than he is a romancer, really a pre-Cervantine kind
of exposition.
Aesthetic dignity is the keynote of everything I have read by Auster. If
there is a missing element in Auster’s achievement, it is comedy, even of a
grotesque variety. It seems fair to contrast Auster with Philip Roth, half a
generation older, yet another lifelong disciple of Franz Kafka. Painful as
Roth’s humor tends to be, it is uproarious and heartening. Perhaps it carries

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558 Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection

the Blessing, the “more life” of Jewish tradition, though in singular form.
Weirdly enough, by implication, Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” (a favorite
of both Roth and Auster) also bears the Blessing. Kafka is comprehensive
enough, in his extreme way, to sustain both Roth and Auster. But Kafka’s
somber comedy remains comic: in Auster no one seems to laugh. The
Jewish joke, which links Freud, Kafka, and Roth, has no presence in Auster.
What—I think—takes its place are Auster’s own appearances in his fic-
tions. In City of Glass the protagonist, Quinn, who writes mystery novels
under the name of Poe’s William Wilson, enjoys an omelette prepared for
him by “Paul Auster”. Quinn and Auster have an unsurprising conversa-
tion about Cervantes, and then Quinn meets Auster’s wife, Siri, and son,
Daniel. Again, this is unsurprising, and is charming, yet puzzling, at least
to me. What does it do for City of Glass? Now that “French Theory” is
only still hot in Peoria, the disruption of representation is hardly worth a
shrug, since in no way does Auster practice an art that seeks to imitate
social reality. His Art of Hunger celebrates Beckett, Kafka, Kanut Hamsun
and Paul Celan as seers of absence. I want to murmur: “Yes, but,” and then
enlarge the “but.” These elliptical literary artists also manifest a richness
that makes me care about what happens next. Auster seems to have no such
concern.
Auster’s creative minimalism has moved many good readers, both here
and abroad. If Auster evades me, I therefore blame myself. And even so,
I go back to my master, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who rightly commended
Shakespeare for his just representations of general nature.
N O V E L I S T S
A N D
Amy Tan
(1952–)

N O V E L S
The Joy Luck Club

IN AN ACCOMPLISHED ESSAY, MYRA JEHLEN SEES AMY TAN, AGAINST ALL


odds, returning to Whitman’s stance and singing a latter-day Song of Myself.
That implicitly is high praise, and if justified might give The Joy Luck Club an
aesthetic dignity beyond the popular success it continues to enjoy. Will it be
a permanent part of the revised canon of an American literature “opened up”
by consideration of gender and ethnicity, or will it prove only another period
piece, in which we currently abound?
Amy Tan is a skilled storyteller, and a remarkable personality. Jehlen
charmingly says: “Amy Tan has read her Emerson, and she doesn’t believe
him. This is not surprising, as he probably would have doubted her.” I
would murmur that it all depends upon which Emerson Tan has read, as
there are so many. Having met and admired Tan, I would recommend The
Conduct of Life, which is consonant with her rugged but amiable stance
towards reality.
Jehlen eloquently concludes by stating both Tan’s relation to Whitman
and the significant differences:

Jing-Mei becomes herself finally when, like Whitman, she can


be the writer of the Body and the writer of the Soul, can sing both
others and herself. If she is Whitman’s critic as well as his descen-
dant, it is because America has lost its innocence in the matter of
individualism. Moreover, the duplicities of the notion of the uni-
versal self have been revealed in our time especially by the protes-
tations of people of Amy Tan’s kind: women and non-whites. It is
not surprising that Jing-Mei’s claim be not as universal as

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Whitman’s, nor that its costs be apparent. It is surprising to find


her claiming the old transcendent, appropriating self at all, and, in
the name of culture, singing a latter-day “Song of Myself.”

Jehlen is aware, as I am, that Whitman attempted to speak for women


as for men, and for all ethnic strains. What she doubts is the Whitmanian
possibility of universal representation, since we are in a time of group iden-
tities: gendered, diversely oriented sexual preferences, ethnicities. And yet
Whitman, at his best, permanently has reached and held a universal audi-
ence. Song of Myself is not a period piece.
Further Reading

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the


Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Bartram, Graham, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German
Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New
York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.
Bradbury, Malcom, ed. The Atlas of Literature. London : De Agostini
Editions, 1996.
Chase, Richard Volney. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: the Origins of the English Novel. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Denby, David. Great Books. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor
Books, 1992 (reprint edition).
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.
Fowler, Alister. A History of English Literature. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987
Hunter, J.P. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century
English Fiction. New York: Norton and Co., 1990.
James, Henry. The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction. New
York: Vintage Books, 1956.
Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
McKeon, Michael, ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Mirsky, D.S., and Francis J. Whitfield. A History of Russian Literature:
From Its Beginnings to 1900. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1999.

561
562 FURTHER READING

Muir, Edwin. The Structure of the Novel. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Pascal, Roy. The German Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1956.
Rascoe, Burton. Titans of Literature: From Homer to the Present. London:
Routledge, 1933.
Ruland, Richard and Malcom Bradbury. From Puritanism to
Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Penguin
Books, 1992.
Turnell, Martin. The Novel in France: Mme. De La Fayette, Laclos, Constant,
Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust. New York: New Directions, 1951.
Turner, Harriet, and Adelaida López de Martínez ed. The Cambridge
Companion to the Spanish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003.
Unwin, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.
Berkley: University of California Press, 1957.
Index

Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 314–15, 198–202, 212


317, 322, 328, 384, 477, 529 American, The (James), 193
influence on, 217 American Dream, An (Mailer), 477,
narrative, 323, 326 479–81
numinous shadow in, 323–26, 353 American Pastoral (Roth), 529, 532, 544
Across the River and Into the Trees American Scene, The (James), 197–98,
(Hemingway), 337 236
Ada (Nabokov), 340 American Tragedy, An (Dreiser), 169,
Adam Bede (Eliot, G.), 67, 141, 147 236, 243, 305, 352, 395, 479
Adams, Robert M., 72–73 Ammons, A.R., 241
Adorno, T.W., 366 Anatomy Lesson, The (Roth), 524,
Adventures of Augie March, The 526–28
(Bellow), 418–20, 422 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 10
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), Ancient Evenings (Mailer), 477, 480–81,
xviii, 91–92, 327, 400, 480, 521 549
freedom and loneliness in, 169–70 Anderson, Sherwood, 236, 313
influence of, 230–31, 233 Animal Farm (Orwell), 242, 363,
Adventures of Roderick Random, The 369–71
(Smollett), 59 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 76, 163–68,
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain), 230 202
Advertisements for Myself (Mailer), Apple, Max, 478–79
477–78, 480 Argas, Reinard, 500
After Strange Gods (Eliot, T.S.), 174, Aristotle, 10, 181
181, 189, 374 Armies of the Night, The (Mailer), 480
Age of Innocence (Wharton), 192, 220–21 Arnold, Matthew, 139
Agnes Grey (Brontë, A.), 125 Arrowsmith (Lewis), 302–5
Alexandria: A History and a Guide Art of Hunger (Auster), 558
(Forster), 253–55 Art of Thomas Hardy, The (Johnson, L.),
Algren, Nelson, 126, 331 188
Allen, Walter, 137 Ashbery, John, 241, 544, 548, 554
All the King’s Men (Warren), 382, As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), xvii, 314,
384–86 328, 477, 492, 529
All the Names (Saramago), 462–63 American sublime in, 92, 192, 353,
All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), 532, 365, 502, 548
538–39, 544 influence of, 169, 345, 495, 521–23,
All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 532
47, 529 irony, 317
Alter, Robert, 409 narrative, 315, 318, 322
Altitudes and Extensions (Warren), 381 quest for community, 315–17
Ambassadors, The (James), 104, 193, Asolando (Browning), 380–81

563
564 INDEX

Assistant, The (Malamud), 409 Ballad of the Sad Café, The (McCullers),
Asturias, Miguel Angel, 501 433, 436–37
As You Like It (Shakespeare), 46–47, Baltasar and Blimunda (Saramago),
64–65 455–59, 461–62
At Fault (Chopin), 204 Balzac, Honoré de, 1, 137, 243, 302,
At Heaven’s Gate (Warren), 382 344
Atheist’s Tragedy, The (Tourneur), 319 A Harlot High and Low, 90
Auden, W.H., 262, 471 influences of, 171–72, 203, 224, 502
Auerbach, Erich, 332 influences on, xviii, 88–90
Mimesis, 265 The Last Incarnation of Vautrin, 90
Aureng-Zebe (Dryden), 24 Lost Illusions, 90
“Auroras of Autumn, The” (Stevens), Père Goriot, 87–90
226, 332, 544, 548 Splendors and Miseries of the
Auslander, Joseph, xiv Courtesans, 90
Austen, Jane Band of Angels (Warren), 382
death, 67 Barber, C.L., 64
Emma, 28, 52–53, 59–63, 66, 68–69, Barchester Towers (Trollope), 119–24
107, 112, 126, 141 Barzilai, Shuli, 104
influences of, 263 Bates, W.J., 83
influence on, xviii, 48–49, 51–52, 66, Battle of the Books, The (Swift), 10
192, 197 Baudelaire, Charles, 1, 25, 89, 151, 302
Mansfield Park, 53, 56–59, 62–66, Bayou Folk (Chopin), 204
69, 126 Bear, The (Faulkner), 521
Persuasion, 53, 62–71, 141 Beaver, Harold, 246
Pride and Prejudice, 52–56, 59, Beckett, Samuel, xviii, 151, 259, 365,
62–66, 69, 112, 141 445
protagonists, xix, 51, 59–63, 65–66 Endgame, 390
Sanditon, 67 How It Is, 387, 390–91
satire and irony of, 49, 51–52, 55, influences of, 557–58
62–64, 66–67, 70 influences on, 173, 387–92
Sense and Sensibility, 62, 64, 143 Krapp’s Last Tape, 389–90
Auster, Paul Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,
Art of Hunger, 558 152, 387–92, 404, 438
The New York Trilogy, 557–58 Murphy, 387–88, 390, 438–39
Autumn of the Patriarch, The (Márquez), Proust, 389
500 Waiting for Godot, 389–90
Awakening, The (Chopin), 204–9 Watt, 387–88, 390, 438
Beginning Place, The (Le Guin), 506,
Babbitt (Lewis), 302–5 510
Backward Glance, A (Wharton), 220 Behan, Brendan, 442
Bacon, Francis, 10–11 Being Here (Warren), 381
Baldwin, James, xvii, 518 Bellow, Saul, 354, 446, 541
The Fire Next Time, 484–87 The Adventures of Augie March,
Go Tell It on the Mountain, 482–84 418–20, 42
No Name in the Street, 484, 487–89 Dangling Man, 418
The Price of the Ticket, 487, 489–90 The Dean’s December, 418, 422
INDEX 565

Henderson the Rain King, 418, Borges, Jorge Luis


422–23 influences of, 173, 455, 464, 500–1,
Herzog, 418–25, 525 503, 506, 545, 557
Humboldt’s Gift, 418–19, 422–23 Bostonians The (James), 149, 198
Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 411, 418, 422 Breast, The (Roth), 526, 529
Seize the Day, 418 “Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The”
The Victim, 418 (Crane, S.), 245
Beloved (Morrison), 517–23 Bridge, The (Crane, H.), 545
Benjamin, Walter, 507 Brighton Rock (Greene), 375–79
Berenson, Bernard, 194 Brod, Max, 272
Berg, Jan Hendrik Van Den, 22, 278 “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope,
Bête humaine, La (Zola), 171 and The True Way,” 273
Between the Acts (Woolf), 267–68 Brodkey, Harold
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), Women and Angels, 354
341, 450 Brontë, Anne, 188
Bishop, Elizabeth, 241, 328 Agnes Grey, 125
“Crusoe in England,” 3 Byron’s influence on, 125–26
Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 125
Youth (Wright), 394, 396–98 Brontë, Charlotte, xviii, xix, 135, 188,
Black Prince, The (Murdoch), 445, 300
449–50 Byron’s influence on, 125–30
Blake, William, 364, 423, 511, 550 “Caroline Vernon,” 126
Book of Urizen, 80 death, 133
double of self, 78–79 Jane Eyre, 67, 127–30, 134
The Four Zoas, 282 The Professor, 125
influences of, 18, 37, 44, 85, 126, Shirley, 125, 130
132, 135, 157–60, 249, 267, 271, Villette, 125, 130
316, 389, 462, 464, 495, 508 Brontë, Emily, xviii, xix, 188, 508
Jerusalem, 112 Byron’s influence on, 125–26, 131,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 134
285 death, 133
Milton, 112 “Farewell to Angria,” 130
Bleak House (Dickens), 93, 107–8, Wuthering Heights, 67, 125–26, 129,
112–18, 149 131–36, 296
Blindness (Saramago), 462–63, 474 Brooks, Cleanth, 314–15, 320
Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 92, 169, Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky),
529, 544–45 156–62
narrative of, xviii, 246, 532–38 Browne, Thomas
Bloom, Harold Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 10
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Brown, Frederick
Exemplary Creative Minds, 241 Zola: A Life, 171–72
How to Read and Why, xvii, 244 Browning, Robert, 112, 224, 294
“Blue Hotel, The” (Crane, S.), 245 Asolando, 380–81
Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 516–18 “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Book of Urizen (Blake), 80 Came,” 118
Borderers, The (Wordsworth), 126 Bruno’s Dream (Murdoch), 445
566 INDEX

Buchan, John, 372 481–82, 495


The Thirty-Nine Steps, 374 “Natural Supernaturalism,” 211
Bundren, Darl, 212 Sartor Resartus, 15, 282
Bunyan, John “Caroline Vernon” (Brontë), 126
The Pilgrim’s Progress, 4, 44 Carpenter’s Gothic (Gaddis), 452
Burgess, Anthony Carpentier, Alejo, 501, 503
A Clockwork Orange, 441 Explosion in a Cathedral, 502
The Clockwork Testament; or, Enderby’s Carroll, Lewis, 243
End, 438, 442 The Hunting of the Snark, 340
Enderby’s Dark Lady; or, No End to Through the Looking Glass, 340
Enderby, 438, 442, 444 “White Knight’s Ballad,” 139
Enderby Outside, 438, 442 “Casabianca” (Hemans), xiv
Inside Enderby, 438, 442–44 Castle, The (Kafka), 282, 287–90
Man of Nazareth, 442 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 244
Moses, 441 Cather, Willa, 302, 351
Nothing Like the Sun, 438–39, 442, death, 235
444 Death Comes for the Archbishop,
A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life, 438 235–36
Burke, Kenneth, xv, 241, 333, 364 influences on, 235–39
Burney, Fanny, 51, 57 A Lost Lady, 192, 235–39
Evelina, 38, 48–50 My Ántonia, 91, 169, 235–39
Burton, Robert “On the Art of Fiction,” 236
The Anatomy of Melancholy, 10 O Pioneers!, 235
Byron, Lord, 331, 525, 554 The Professor’s House, 235–37
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 77 Shadows on the Rock, 235
death, 126 Cave, The (Saramago), 455, 463
Don Juan, 112, 477 Celan, Paul, 259
double of self, 78 Cervantes, Miguel de, 34, 89, 153, 329
influences of, 67, 73, 86, 88, 125–32, influence of, xvii, 504, 557
134, 181 The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote
Lara, 129 de La Mancha, xvii, 1–2, 4, 75,
Manfred, 80, 129, 132, 134 231, 502
Chambers, Jessie
Caleb Williams (Godwin), 80–81 D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record,
Call of the Wild, The (London), 242 296
Calvin, John, 3, 46 Chandler, Raymond, 557
Camus, Albert Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill),
influences on, 401–2, 404–7 506, 548
The Plague, 404–7, 463 Charterhouse of Parma, The (Stendhal), 75
The Stranger, 401–4, 407 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34, 369
Candide (Voltaire), 401, 407 Chesterton, G.K., 374
Canetti, Elias, 446 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 77
“Cares of a Family Man, The” (Kafka), “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
279–81 Came” (Browning), 118
Carlyle, Thomas, 199, 364 Chopin, Kate
influences of, 96–98, 107, 139, 369, At Fault, 204
INDEX 567

The Awakening, 204–9 influences on, 173, 192, 263, 387


Bayou Folk, 204 Lord Jim, 211, 213, 216–19, 324,
influences on, 204–5 332
A Night in Acadie, 204 The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 211
Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 97 Nostromo, 211–17, 253, 265, 314,
Church, Richard, 78 324, 343, 345, 382–83
Cities of the Plain (McCarthy), 539 The Secret Agent, 149, 213, 216, 315,
Citizen of the World, The (Goldsmith), 320
46 Under Western Eyes, 213, 216
City of Illusions (Le Guin), 508 Victory, 213, 217, 265, 324
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), “Youth,” 210
450–51 Cook, Timothy, 242
Clarissa (Richardson), xvii, 28, 53, 107, Cool Million, A (West), 305, 353,
192 360–61, 366, 494
Clarissa Harlowe in, xix, 22–27, 52, Coover, Robert, 542
55–56, 59, 61, 65–66, 126, 138, Corrections, The (Franzen), 453
177, 198, 268 Cortázar, Julio, 501
Lovelace in, 23–26, 55, 61, 66 Counterlife, The (Roth), 529
Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess), 441 Cowley, Malcolm, 314
Clockwork Testament, The; or, Enderby’s The Portable Faulkner, 318
End (Burgess), 438, 442 Cowper, William, 66
Cohn, Robert, 331 Craig, G. Armour, 59–60
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xv, 29, Crane, Hart, 92, 241, 328, 331, 334,
82–83, 85, 126, 438 548
Collins, William, 33 The Bridge, 545
Comedian as the Letter C, The (Stevens), Crane, Stephen
236 “The Blue Hotel,” 245
Commonplace Book (Forster), 250 “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,”
Concluding Unscientific Postscript 245
(Kierkegaard), 464 death, 245
Condition Humaine, La. See Man’s Fate influences of, 245–46, 336
(Malraux) influences on, 246, 248
Conduct of Life, The (Emerson), 193, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 248
390, 559 “A Man Adrift on a Slim Spar,” 245
Confessions of Zeno (Svevo), 422 “The Open Boat,” 245
Confidence Man, The (Melville), 542 The Red Badge of Courage, 245–48
Confidential Agent, The (Greene), 374 “War is Kind,” 245
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky),
(Twain), 480 155–58
Conquest of Granada, The (Dryden), 24 Crossing, The (McCarthy), 539
Conrad, Joseph, xviii, 137, 245–46, 248 Crowley, John
Heart of Darkness, 211–13, 218, 253, Little, Big, 243
324–25, 332, 384 “Crusoe in England” (Bishop), 3
influences of, 311, 314–15, 317–20, Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), xvii,
324, 326, 334, 336, 344, 372, 169, 477, 547–48
374–75, 407, 503, 521 American sublime in, 192, 328, 501,
568 INDEX

505, 525, 529, 542, 544–45 David Copperfield, 103–7, 117, 145
influence of, 454 Edwin Drood, 97
influence on, 353, 533 Great Expectations, 97, 103–4, 143
Curtius, E.R., 241 Hard Times, 107–12, 148
Custom of the Country (Wharton), influences of, 28, 52, 104–7, 121,
220–23 263, 302, 318, 370, 452, 503
influences on, 41, 45, 192
“Daisy Miller” (James), 193 Little Dorrit, 93
Dangling Man (Bellow), 418 Our Mutual Friend, 93, 97, 112
Daniel Deronda (Eliot, G.), 141–45 Pickwick Papers, 97
“Daniel Deronda: A Conversation” satire of, 95
(James), 141–42 A Tale of Two Cities, 97–103, 404
Dante, 1, 89, 91, 150, 159, 241 Dickinson, Emily, 1, 92, 146, 193, 241,
influences of, 279, 286, 440–41, 502, 329, 416
506 Dick, Philip K., 506
Darkness Visible (Golding), 399 Dickstein, Morris, 242–43
David Copperfield (Dickens), 103–7, 117, Dispossessed, The (Le Guin), 506, 510
145 Docteur Pascal, Le (Zola), 171
Day of the Locust, The (West), 353, 360 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 240–41
Dean’s December, The (Bellow), 418, 422 Dodsworth (Lewis, S.), 302–3, 305
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather), Don Juan (Byron), 112, 477
235–36 “Dostoyevski and Parricide” (Freud),
Débâcle, Le (Zola), 171 159
Decline and Fall (Waugh), 39 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 89, 104, 329,
Deer Park, The (Mailer), 481 343–44, 372, 374
Defoe, Daniel, 22, 364 Brothers Karamazov, 156–62
Moll Flanders, 3, 6–9, 38 Crime and Punishment, 155–58
Robinson Crusoe, 3–6 The Idiot, 157
DeLillo, Don, 453 influences of, 319, 402, 404–5
Libra, 540, 544 influences on, xviii
Mao II, 540–41 The Possessed, 157
Underworld, xviii, 169, 454, 529, 532, Dream Life of Balso Snell, The (West),
540–42, 544–46 353, 360, 526–27
White Noise, 454, 540–44 Dreiser, Theodore, 192, 302, 308, 313,
Demian (Hesse), 240 340, 351
Derrida, Jacques, 174, 283 An American Tragedy, 169, 236, 243,
Descartes, René, 10–11 305, 352, 479
Deserted Village, The (Goldsmith), influences of, 393–95, 397–98
43–44 Sister Carrie, 243, 352
De Vere, Edward, 243 Drum-Taps (Whitman), 93
D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record Dryden, John
(Chambers), 296 Aureng-Zebe, 24
Dickens, Charles, 137, 139, 423 The Conquest of Granada, 24
Bleak House, 93, 107–8, 112–18, 149 Dubliners (Joyce), 329
A Christmas Carol, 97 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 377
criticism, 93–97 “Dynamics of the Transference, The”
INDEX 569

(Freud), 433–34 Elmer Gantry (Lewis, S.), 302


Dynasts, The (Shelley), 173 Emma (Austen), 28, 52–53, 69, 107,
112, 141
Earthsea Trilogy, The (Le Guin), 506 Emma Woodhouse in, 59–63, 66,
East of Eden (Steinbeck), 347 68, 126
“Economic Problem in Masochism, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 55, 139
The” (Freud), 180–81 The Conduct of Life, 193, 390, 559
Edwin Drood (Dickens), 97 Essays, xviii, 92
Egg and I, The (MacDonald), 527 “Experience,” 198
Eliot, George, 129, 191 influences of, 66, 132, 173, 192–201,
Adam Bede, 67, 141, 147 203, 205, 207, 209, 226, 237,
Daniel Deronda, 141–45 303, 350–51, 374, 381, 461–62,
Felix Holt, the Radical, 141 482, 501, 509, 524, 538, 541,
influences of, 52, 173–74, 188–89 544, 557
influences on, 63, 140, 150–51, 192, Nature, 420
197, 202 “The Over-Soul,” 350
Middlemarch, 28, 69, 107, 112, 126, self-reliance, 193, 329, 416–17,
138, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149–50, 545–46
198, 268, 480 Empson, William, xv
The Mill on the Floss, 145–47, 179 “Joyce’s Intentions,” 369–71
“Notes on Forms in Art,” 137 Emrich, Wilhelm, 280, 288–89
narrative tradition, 139, 218 Enderby’s Dark Lady; or, No End to
protagonists, 23, 59–61 Enderby (Burgess), 438, 442, 444
Romola, 141, 480 Enderby Outside (Burgess), 438, 442
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, Endgame (Beckett), 390
141, 147–49 End of the Affair, The (Greene), 373
Eliot, T.S., 96, 155, 189, 213, 241, 306 Engel, Monroe, 107–8
After Strange Gods, 174, 181, 188, Epipsychidion (Shelley), 174
374 Erikson, Erik, 492
Four Quartets, 453 Essays (Emerson), xviii, 92
on Gulliver’s Travels, 17 Ethan Frome (Wharton), 223–27
The Idea of a Christian Society, 374 Evelina (Burney), 38, 48–50
influences of, 249–50, 314, 322, Everything That Rises Must Converge
328–29, 331, 334–35, 378, (O’Connor), 494–97
382–83, 423, 455, 493 Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 57, 147
influences on, 193–94, 198, 263, Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer), 477,
294, 319, 328 479–80
on Joyce, 269–70 “Experience” (Emerson), 198
The Waste Land, 235, 314, 320, 453, Explosion in a Cathedral (Carpentier),
495 502
Elliott, Emory, 242–43
Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 351 Fable, A (Faulkner), 313, 315, 318, 322,
influences on, xviii, 412, 416–17, 326
516 Fall of Hyperion, The (Keats), 18
The Invisible Man, 169, 412–17, “Family Romances” (Freud), 143
518–20 “Farewell to Angria” (Brontë, C.), 130
570 INDEX

Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 330, Fire Next Time, The (Baldwin), 484–87
332, 334–36 Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the
“Farewell to Omsk, A” (Perelman), 155 Artists, The (Murdoch), 449–50
Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), 158 First Forty-Nine Stories, The
Faulkner, William, 91, 235, 259, 338, (Hemingway), 328, 481
351, 434 Fish, Harold
Absalom, Absalom!, 217, 314–15, 317, The Duel Image, 409
322–26, 328, 353, 384, 477, 529 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 92, 235, 302
As I Lay Dying, xvii, 92, 169, 192, The Great Gatsby, 169, 212, 236,
314–18, 322, 324, 328, 345, 353, 305, 311–12, 328, 331, 353, 477
365, 477, 492, 495, 502, 521–23, influences of, 313–14, 321, 351, 357
529, 532, 548 influences on, 192, 263, 329
The Bear, 521 romance forms of, xviii, 315
A Fable, 313, 315, 318, 322, 326 Tender is the Night, 150, 311–12
Go Down, Moses, 314 Fixer, The (Malamud), 408–11
The Hamlet, 314 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 87, 204, 235, 344
influences of, 246, 302, 344, 412, influences of, 63, 211, 422, 441, 527
445, 453, 493–95, 499, 500–4, irony of, 154
518–19, 525, 532–33, 537–38 Madame Bovary, 151–54, 202, 434
influences on, 313–15, 317, 319, romantic vision of, 153
322–25, 329, 331, 343, 382, 452 Fletcher, Angus, 332, 391
Intruder in the Dust, 318 Fogel, Aaron, 217
Knight’s Gambit, 318 Folsom, Michael Brewster, 242
Light in August, 169, 314–15, 317, Forms of Life (Price), 143
322–24, 328, 353, 477, 519, Forster, E.M., xix, 212
521–22, 529 Alexandria: A History and a Guide,
on Moll Flanders, 6–7 253–55
Requiem for a Nun, 318 Commonplace Book, 250
romance forms of, xviii, 115, 313, The Hill of Devi, 251–53
319, 424 Howards End, 249–50
Sanctuary, 314, 319–22, 328, 353, influences on, 249–51
494, 516 A Passage to India, 249–51, 253,
The Sound and the Fury, 305, 255–58
313–15, 317–19, 322, 324, 328, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway),
352–53, 477, 529 330
The Wild Palms, 314 Four Just Men, The (Wallace), 374
Faust (Goethe), 453 Four Quartets (Eliot, T.S.), 453
Felix Holt, the Radical (Eliot, G.), 141 Four Zoas, The (Blake), 282
Fiedler, Leslie, 334 Frankenstein (Shelley, M.), 77–86, 134
Fielding, Henry, 57, 59, 193 Frank, Jacob, 275, 284, 359–60
aesthetic eminence of, 38, 51–52 Franzen, Jonathan
romance forms, 28–29, 33–34 The Corrections, 453
Tom Jones, 28–32 Free Fall (Golding), 399
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 270, 387–88, Freud, Sigmund, 120, 162, 179, 339,
501 387, 446
Firbank, Ronald, 357 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 341,
INDEX 571

450 Gilbert, Sandra M., 128, 134, 206


Civilization and Its Discontents, Girard, René, 401–2, 494
450–51 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 314
“Dostoyevski and Parricide,” 159 “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen,”
“The Dynamics of the (Hemingway), 329
Transference,” 433–34 Godwin, William, 77, 86
“The Economic Problem in Caleb Williams, 80–81
Masochism,” 180–81 Goethe, xv, 1, 45, 150, 195
“Family Romances,” 143 Faust, 453
“Humor,” 527 Golden Bowl, The (James), 105, 212
influences of, 173, 176, 187–88, 194, Golding, William
236–37, 318, 340–41, 441, 484, Darkness Visible, 399
504, 558 Free Fall, 399
An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 288 The Inheritors, 399
reality principle, 47, 68, 224, Lord of the Flies, 399–400
290–91, 514 Pincher Martin, 399
superego, 143, 356 Goldsmith, Oliver, xvii, 43–47
theories of, 3, 12, 33–34, 43, 97, The Citizen of the World, 46
102, 104–5, 107, 109, 117, The Deserted Village, 43–44
126–29, 135, 137, 139, 152, 245, Retaliation, 44
264, 273, 275, 277–79, 281, 283, She Stoops to Conquer, 43–44, 46–47
286, 294–95, 306, 313, 332, 355, The Traveller, 44
384, 423, 512, 524 The Vicar of Wakefield, 38, 43–46
Totem and Taboo, 159–60, 229 Good Apprentice, The (Murdoch), 445–51
Frolic of His Own, A (Gaddis), 452 Good Man Is Hard to Find, A
Frost, Robert, 193, 241, 328, 331 (O’Connor), 494–95
Frye, Northrop, xv, 33, 176, 241 Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The
Fuentes, Carlos, 500–1 (Saramago), 455, 461–75
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin),
Gaddis, William, 542 482–84
Carpenter’s Gothic, 452 Grahame, Kenneth
A Frolic of His Own, 452 The Wind in the Willows, 243, 370
JR, 452 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck),
The Recognitions, 452–54, 545 347–52
Garland, Hamlin, 302 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 412, 529,
Garnett, Edward, 295 532
Genealogy of Morals, The (Nietzshe), 224 Byron the Bulb in, 413–14, 525,
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred 548–56
Exemplary Creative Minds (Bloom), influence of, 353, 365–66, 424, 502,
241 506, 544–45
Germinal (Zola), 171 Gray, Thomas, 33
Ghost Writer, The (Roth), 524–28 Great American Novel, The (Roth), 526,
Gibbon, Edward 529
The History of the Decline and Fall of Great Expectations (Dickens), 97, 103–4,
the Roman Empire, 46 143
Gide, André, 9, 317, 423 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 169, 305,
572 INDEX

328, 477 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 126, 175,


American dream in, 236, 311–12, 181, 184–88, 191
353 The Well-Beloved, 188
influence of, 212, 331 The Woodlanders, 190, 237
Greene, Graham, 446 Harlot High and Low, A (Balzac), 90
Brighton Rock, 375–79 Hartman, Geoffrey, 343, 476
The Confidential Agent, 374 Harvest of Hellenism, The (Peters), 254
The End of the Affair, 373 Harvey, W.J., 112–13
The Heart of the Matter, 373–74, 377 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 313, 395, 557
“Henry James: The Religious influences of, 193–94, 227, 322, 452,
Aspect,” 373 493, 505, 519
influences on, 372–75 The Marble Faun, 91–92, 192
The Ministry of Fear, 374 The Scarlet Letter, xviii–xix, 91–92,
Our Man in Havana, 374 150, 169, 192, 198, 202–3, 223
The Power and the Glory, 374–75, Hazlitt, William, xv, 7–8, 44
377 Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The
The Quiet American, 374 (McCullers), 433–36
“Rider Haggard’s Secret,” 372–73 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 212–13,
The Third Man, 374 253, 324–25, 332, 384
This Gun for Hire, 374–77 Heart of the Matter, The (Greene),
Griffith, Hugh, 31 373–74, 377
Gubar, Susan, 128, 134 Heller, Erich, 275–76, 282, 287
Guerard, Albert J., 217, 322 Hemans, Felecia
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 14–21, 369, “Casabianca,” xiv
400 Hemingway, Ernest, 170, 235, 357
Guttmann, Allen, 409 Across the River and Into the Trees,
337
Habit of Being, The (O’Connor), 494 death, 328
Haggard, Rider, 372–73 A Farewell to Arms, 330, 332, 334–36
King Solomon’s Mines, 374 The First Forty-Nine Stories, 328, 481
She, 374 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 330
Hamlet, The (Faulkner), 314 “God Rest You Merry Gentleman,”
Handful of Dust, A (Waugh), 39 329
Hard Times (Dickens), 107–12, 148 influences of, 302, 321, 347, 351,
Hardwick, Elizabeth, 476 401–2, 476–81, 545
Hard Words and Other Poems (Le Guin), influences on, 92, 192, 245–46,
509 313–14, 327–28, 350
Hardy, Thomas, xviii, 150, 387 “Old Man at the Bridge,” 330
influences of, 125, 173–75, 182–83, The Old Man and the Sea, 336–38
185–89, 294, 296, 300, 322 “A Natural History of the Dead,”
Jude the Obscure, 175, 177, 181, 329
188–91 romance, forms of, xviii, 126, 315,
The Mayor of Casterbridge, 173–81, 423
191 The Sun Also Rises, 169, 212, 236,
The Return of the Native, 147, 175, 328–29, 331–34, 337–38,
181–84, 190–91 348–49, 353, 477, 481, 521
INDEX 573

To Have and Have Not, 330 Humphries, Jefferson, 495


Winner Takes Nothing, 331 Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 38–42
Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), 418, “Hunter Gracchus, The” (Kafka),
422–23 278–79
Henry IV (Shakespeare), 159 Hunting of the Snark, The (Carroll), 340
“Henry James: The Religious Aspect” Hurston, Zora Neale, 516, 518
(Greene), 374 Moses: Man of the Mountain, 306
Herbert, Christopher, 119–21 Their Eyes Were Watching God,
Herzog (Bellow), 418–25, 525 306–10
Hesse, Herman Hutton, R.H., 177–78
Demian, 240 Huxley, Aldous, 357
Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), Huysmans, J.K., 249
240–41 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 354
Siddhartha, 240 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”
Steppenwolf, 240 (Shelley, P.), 81
Hilles, Frederick W., 28
Hill, Geoffrey, 188 Ibsen Henrik, 177, 189
Hill of Devi, The (Forster) Brand, 271
Maharajah in, 251–53 Idea of a Christian Society, The (Eliot,
History of the Decline and Fall of the T.S.), 374
Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 466 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 157
History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Iliad (Homer), 199, 494
(Saramago), 461–63 Imaginary Portraits (Pater), 211
Hobbes, Thomas I Married a Communist (Roth), 529
Leviathan, 76 Impressionism
Hollander, John, 239, 332, 340, 391–92 forms of, 199, 218, 234, 248, 407
Homage to Catalonia (Orwell), 364, 369 “Incidents in the Life of my uncle Arly”
Homer, 104, 159, 215, 246 (Lear), 139
Iliad, 199, 494 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
influences of, 277, 282, 441 (Jacobs), 523
Hope, Anthony In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck), 347
The Prisoner of Zenda, 374 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera, 501
Horkheimer, Max, 366 Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La
House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 220 Mancha, The (Cervantes), xvii, 1–2,
Howards End (Forster), 249–50 4, 74, 231, 502
Howe, Irving, 529 Inheritors, The (Golding), 399
How It Is (Beckett), 387, 390–91 “In the Penal Colony”(Kafka), 19
How to Read and Why (Bloom), xvii, 244 Inside Enderby (Burgess), 438, 442–44
Hugo, Victor, 1, 88, 171, 201 “Interview with Mark Twain, An”
Human Comedy, The (Saroyan), 89 (Twain), 230
Human Stain, The (Roth), 529 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 318
Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow), 418–19, 422–23 Invisible Man, The (Ellison), 169,
Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 411, 418 412–17, 518–20
Seize the Day, 418 Irwin, John T., 313, 323, 326
The Victim, 418 It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis, S.), 366
“Humor” (Freud), 527
574 INDEX

Jacobs, Harriet The Art of Thomas Hardy, 188


Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Johnson, Samuel, xvii, 4, 40, 59, 65–66,
523 364, 442, 549, 558
James, Henry, 44, 63, 96, 137, 189, 245, on Clarissa, 26
248, 313 on Evelina, 48
The Ambassadors, 104, 193, 198–202, on Fielding, 28–29, 32
212 Lives of the Poets, xv
The American, 193 The Rambler, 52, 58, 70
The American Scene, 197–98, 236 Rasselas, 52
on Balzac, 87, 89–90 on Tristram Shandy, 33, 244
The Bostonians, 149, 198 “Josephine the Singer and the Mouse
“Daisy Miller,” 193 Folk” (Kafka), 284–86
“Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” Journey to Portugal (Saramago), 462
141–42 Joyce, James, xviii, 52, 259, 279, 337
death, 236, 318 Dubliners, 329
on Dickens, 93–95 Finnegans Wake, 270, 387–88, 501
on George Eliot, 141–42, 147 influences of, 174, 192
The Golden Bowl, 105, 212 influences on, 152, 263, 270–71,
influences of, 52, 174, 220–21, 224, 319, 339, 389–91, 445, 472, 503
236–37, 329–30, 372–75, 395, on Moll Flanders, 6–7
524 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
influences on, 192–99, 203, 263, Man, 269–71
268, 350, 374 Ulysses, xvii, 28, 64, 104, 107, 250,
on Madame Bovary, 152–53 269–70, 305, 317–18, 329, 387,
The Portrait of a Lady, xviii, 28, 438–42, 444, 453, 525
91–92, 105, 107, 126, 141, 150, “Joyce’s Intentions” (Empson), 369–71
169, 192, 198, 201–3, 220–21, Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 559–60
250, 373 JR (Gaddis), 452
Princess Casamassima (James), 104 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 175, 177, 181,
protagonists, xix, 23, 59–60 184, 188–91
The Spoils of Poynton, 211 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 242–44
What Maisie Knew, 211 Jungle Book, The (Kipling), 228, 246
The Wings of the Dove, 105, 192, Just So Stories (Kipling), 228
198, 373
Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.), 67, 126–30, 134 Kafka, Franz, xviii, 259, 365, 391–92
Jazz (Morrison), 517–18 “The Cares of a Family Man,”
Jehlen, Myra, 559 279–81
Jerusalem (Blake), 112 The Castle, 282, 287–90, 527
Jesenská, Milena, 272–73 evasiveness, 275–76, 278–80, 283,
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 235–36 288
Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 39 “The Hunter Gracchus,” 278–79
John Brown: The Making of a Martyr influences of, 19–20, 104, 402, 404,
(Warren), 381 463–64, 500, 503, 506–7, 524,
Johnson, Ben, 41, 43–45, 51, 93, 96 526–28, 530, 545, 557–58
Johnson, Edgar, 105 influences on, 121, 152
Johnson, Lionel, 187 “Josephine the Singer and the
INDEX 575

Mouse Folk,” 284–86 L’Assommoir (Zola), 171


“In the Penal Colony,” 19 Last Gentleman, The (Percy), 426
“The Problem of Our Laws,” Last Incarnation of Vautrin, The (Balzac),
284–85, 293 90
spirituality, 272–78, 281–87, 290–93 Lawrence, D.H., xviii –xiv, xix, 168
The Trial, 19, 290–93 and human sexuality, 294–95, 300–1,
Kangaroo (Lawrence), 301 356
Karamazov Companion, A (Terras), 158 influences of, 125–26, 150, 308, 369,
Keats, John, 83, 112, 139, 153, 442 423, 433, 517
The Fall of Hyperion, 18 influences on, 23, 263, 294–97, 300
influences of, 311, 315, 317, 322–23 Kangaroo, 301
“Ode on Melancholy,” 336 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 301
Ode to Indolence, 315 The Man Who Died, 356, 461, 471
To Autumn, 315, 322 The Plumed Serpent, 301, 356
Kendrick, Walter M., 119 The Rainbow, 125, 174, 265, 295,
Kenner, Hugh, 174, 269–71, 306, 317, 297–301, 434
388–89 Sons and Lovers, 145, 295–98
Kermode, Frank, 213, 230 A Study of Thomas Hardy, 174–75,
Kidnapped (Stevenson), 374 179–80, 188–89
Kierkegaard, Søren, 105, 139, 160 Women in Love, 107, 125, 174, 265,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 464 295, 297–301
Kim (Kipling), 230–34, 327, 400 “Leaning Tower, The” (Woolf), 262–63
King Lear (Shakespeare), 118, 466 Lear, Edward
King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard), 374 “Incidents in the Life of my uncle
Kipling, Rudyard, xviii, 229, 373 Arly,” 139
influences on, 230–34 Leary, Lewis, 207
“An Interview with Mark Twain,” Leaves of Grass (Whitman), xviii, 92,
230 169, 205, 231
The Jungle Book, 228, 246 Leavis, F.R., 141, 146, 148
Just So Stories, 228 Le Carré, John, 374
Kim, 228, 230–34, 327, 400 Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin), xviii,
“The Man Who Would Be King,” 225, 505–14
228 Le Guin, Ursula K.
Knight’s Gambit (Faulkner), 318 The Beginning Place, 506, 510
Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 389–90 City of Illusions, 508
The Dispossessed, 506, 510
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 301 The Earthsea Trilogy, 506
Lamb, Charles, 7 Hard Words and Other Poems, 509
Lambert, Louis, 89 The Language of the Night, 506–7
Lampedusa, Guiseppe de The Left Hand of Darkness, xviii, 225,
The Leopard, 75 505–14
Lancelot (Percy), 426–28, 430 The Tombs of Atuan, 506
Language of the Night, The (Le Guin), Leopard, The (Lampedusa), 75
506–7 Lessing, Doris, 307, 506
Lanham, Richard, 34, 36 Lessing, G.E., xv
Lara (Byron), 129 Letting Go (Roth), 529
576 INDEX

Leviathan (Hobbes), 76 202, 434


Lewis, C.S., 52, 56–57 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane, S.),
Lewis, R.W.B., 220, 224, 412 248
Lewis, Sinclair Magic Mountain (Mann), 240
Arrowsmith, 302–5 Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead
Babbitt, 302–5 Game) (Hesse), 240–41
death, 302 Mailer, Norman, 126, 246, 329, 354,
Dodsworth, 302–3, 305 418, 423
Elmer Gantry, 302 Advertisements for Myself, 477–78,
It Can’t Happen Here, 366 480
Main Street, 302, 397 An American Dream, 477, 479–81
Lewis, Wyndham, 306, 335, 366 Ancient Evenings, 477, 480–81, 549
Libra (DeLillo), 540, 544 The Armies of the Night, 480
Light in August (Faulkner), 169, 477, criticism, 476–79
519, 521–22, 529 The Deer Park, 481
narratives, 314–15, 317, 322–24, The Executioner’s Song, 477, 479–80
328, 353 The Naked and the Dead, 478
Lima, Lezama, 501 Salammbô, 477
Lindsay, David Why Are We In Vietnam?, 477,
Voyage to Arcturus, 506 480–81
Lion and the Unicorn, The (Orwell), 369 Main Street (Lewis, S.), 302, 397
Little, Big (Crowley), 243 Malamud, Bernard, 354, 525
Little Dorrit (Dickens), 93 The Assistant, 409
Lives of the Poets (Johnson), xv The Fixer, 408–10
Llosa, Mario Vargas, 501 The Tenants, 408–11
Locke, John, 33–34, 56–57 Malraux, André, 402
Lolita (Nabokov), 339–42, 422 Man’s Fate, 343–46
London, Jack “Man Adrift on a Slim Spar, A”
The Call of the Wild, 242 (Crane, S.), 245
Lord Jim (Conrad) , 211, 213, 216–19, Manfred (Byron), 80, 129, 132, 134
324, 332 Mann, Thomas, 259, 478
Lord of the Flies (Golding), 399–400 Doctor Faustus, 240–41
Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 514 influences on, 173, 387
Lost Illusions (Balzac), 90 Magic Mountain, 240
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Man of Nazareth (Burgess), 442
Book (Percy), 427 Man, Paul de, 174, 478
Lost Lady, A (Cather), 192, 235–39 Man’s Fate (Malraux), 343–46
Love in the Ruins (Percy), 426–27 Mansfield Park (Austen), 53, 62–63, 65,
Love in the Time of Cholera (Márquez), 69
503–4 Fanny Price in, 56–59, 64, 66, 126
Man Who Died, The (Lawrence), 356,
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 282 461, 471
MacDonald, Betty “Man Who Would Be King, The”
The Egg and I, 527 (Kipling), 228
MacNeice, Louis, 262 Man Without Qualities, The (Musil),
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 151–54, 259–61
INDEX 577

Mao II (DeLillo), 540–41 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 529


Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), 91–92, Meisel, Perry, 263
192 Melville, Herman, 183, 313
Marius the Epicurean (Pater), 211, 264 The Confidence Man, 542
Marlowe, Christopher, 41–42, 104 influences of, 246, 322, 326, 329–30,
The Jew of Malta, 39 405, 503, 519, 532–39, 545, 557
Márquez, Gabriel García, 445 influences on, 193, 464
The Autumn of the Patriarch, 500 irony, 253
influences on, xviii, 500–4 Moby Dick, xvii–xviii, 91–92, 131,
Love in the Time of Cholera, 503–4 169, 192, 231, 296, 404, 412,
One Hundred Years of Solitude, 500–4 453, 480, 532, 534, 536, 538
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Omoo, 357
(Blake), 285 Pierre, 480
Martz, Louis L., 296, 334 Typee, 357
Marx, Karl, 188 Mencken, H.L., 303, 397
literary criticism style, 108, 316, Merrill, James, 241
345–46, 364–65, 369, 396, 466, Changing Light at Sandover, 506, 548
507, 515, 521 Messianic Idea in Judaism, The
on Robinson Crusoe, 3 (Scholem), 353–54, 359
Mason, A.E.W., 372 Michael (Wordsworth), 315
Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), xviii, 453, Middlemarch (Eliot, G.), 28, 107, 112,
529, 532, 544, 547, 556 145, 480
Matthiessen, F.O., 201 Dorothea Brooke in, 126, 141, 143,
Maud (Tennyson), 111 149–50, 198, 268
Maugham, Somerset Lydgate in, 143
The Moon and Sixpence, 357 Will Ladislaw, 61, 141
Maupassant, Guy de, 173, 211, 329–30 Miller, J. Hillis, 119, 174, 184–87, 265
Mayor of Casterbridge, The (Hardy), Millgate, Michael, 188
173–81, 191 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot), 141,
McCarthy, Cormac 145–47, 179
All the Pretty Horses, 532, 538–39, Milne, A.A., 6
544 Milton (Blake), 112
Blood Meridian, xviii, 92, 169, 246, Milton, John, 153, 513
529, 532–39, 544–45 influence of, 44, 52, 90, 126, 286,
Cities of the Plain, 539 294, 364, 369
The Crossing, 539 Paradise Lost, 57, 79–80, 83–85, 88,
influences on, xviii, 452–53 134, 388
Suttree, 538, 544 Samson Agonistes, 127
McCullers, Carson Mimesis (Auerbach), 265
The Ballad of the Sad Café, 433, Ministry of Fear, The (Greene), 374
436–37 Minter, David, 313
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 433–36 Miss Lonleyhearts (West), 169, 328–29,
influences on, 434 412
Reflections in a Golden Eye, 433, 436 influence of, 477, 492, 495
McKillop, A.D., 24 negative vision in, 192, 305, 353–62,
McMaster, Juliet, 63 365, 525, 542, 548
578 INDEX

Moby Dick (Melville), xvii, 91–92, 169, Under the Net, 449
480 A Word Child, 445
influence of, xviii, 6, 131, 192, 231, Murphy (Beckett), 387–88, 390, 438–39
296, 404, 412, 453, 532, 534, Musil, Robert
536, 538 death, 260
Modernism The Man Without Qualities, 259–61
forms of, 174, 177, 259, 263, 265, My Ántonia (Cather), 91, 169, 235–39
306, 389, 422–24 Myers, F.W.H., 138
Molan, Ann, 70 Myers, L.H.
Molière, 1, 88 The Near and the Far, 138
Moll Flanders (Defoe), 3, 6–9, 38 My Life As a Man (Roth), 524, 529
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable Mysterious Stranger, The (Twain), 542
(Beckett), 152, 387–92, 404, 438 Mystery and Manners (O’Connor), 494
Monegal, Emir, 501
Monod, Sylvère, 128 Nabokov, Vladimir, 423
Montaigne, Michel de, 1 Ada, 340
“Mont Blanc” (Shelley, P.), 81 Lolita, 339–42, 422
Mookerjee, R.N., 242 Pale Fire, 169, 502
Moon and Sixpence, The (Maugham), 357 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 478
Moore, George, 358 Nana (Zola), 171
Morgan, Susan, 69 Native Son (Wright) 393–98
Morley, John, 139–41 “Natural History of the Dead, A”
Morris, Matthew J., 242–43 (Hemingway), 329
Morrison, Toni, xviii–xix Naturalism, xvii, 172, 248, 445
Beloved, 517–23 “Natural Supernaturalism” (Caryle),
The Bluest Eye, 516–18 211
Jazz, 517–18 Nature (Emerson), 420
Paradise, 517–18 Near and the Far, The (Myers), 138
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the New York Trilogy, The (Auster), 557–58
Literary Imagination, 518 Nietzshce, Friedrich, 139, 213
Song of Solomon, 516–21, 523 on George Eliot, 150
Sula, 515–16, 521 on Emerson, 194, 201
Morris, William, 107, 249 The Genealogy of Morals, 224
Moses (Burgess), 441 influences of, 105, 158, 160, 199,
Moses: Man of the Mountain (Hurston), 230, 237, 276, 279, 291, 295,
306 313, 323, 325, 332–33, 343–44,
Moviegoer, The (Percy), 426–32 424, 482, 519
Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow), 411, influences on, 387, 401
418, 422 Nigger of the “Narcissus,” The (Conrad),
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 61, 263–65 211
Murdoch, Iris, xviii Night in Acadie, A (Chopin), 204
The Black Prince, 445, 449–50 Night Rider (Warren), 381–82
Bruno’s Dream, 445 1984 (Orwell)
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato aesthetic failure of, 364–66, 369–70
Banished the Artists, 449–50 irony and satire, 363–70
The Good Apprentice, 445–51 No Name in the Street (Baldwin), 484,
INDEX 579

487–89 Operation Shylock (Roth), 529


Norton, Charles Eliot, 194 O Pioneers! (Cather), 235
Nostromo (Conrad), 212, 253, 314, 345 Oranging of America, The (Apple),
illusions and irony in, 215–16 478–79
modern imagination of, 265 Ordinary Evening in New Haven, An
narrative, 211, 213, 217, 324, 343, (Stevens), 501
382 Orwell, George, 19, 482
“Notes on Forms in Art” (Eliot, G.), Animal Farm, 242, 363, 369–71
137 Homage to Catalonia, 364, 369
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), The Lion and the Unicorn, 369
501 1984, 363–70
Nothing Like the Sun (Burgess), 438–39, Shooting an Elephant, 369
442, 444 Othello (Shakespeare), 214, 536
Our Gang (Roth), 526, 529
O’Connor, Flannery, 430 Our Man in Havana (Greene), 374
Everything That Rises Must Converge, Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 93, 97,
494–97 112
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 494–95 Outline of Psychoanalysis, An (Freud), 288
The Habit of Being, 494 “Over-Soul, The” (Emerson), 350
influences on, xviii, 452, 491–95 Owen, Wilfred, 188
Mystery and Manners, 494
“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Pale Fire (Nabokov), 169, 502
Southern Fiction,” 498–99 Paradise (Morrison), 517–18
The Violent Bear It Away, 169, Paradise Lost (Milton), 57, 79–80, 83–85,
491–95 134
Wise Blood, 494–95 influence of, 88, 388
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Pascal, Blaise, 72, 401
Recollections of Earliest Childhood” Passage to India (Forster), 249–51, 253,
(Wordsworth), 68 255–58
“Ode on Melancholy” (Keats), 336 Pater, Walter, xiv–xv, 133, 139, 314
Ode to Indolence (Keats), 315 influences of, 198–201, 206, 236–37,
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 347, 239, 263, 265–67, 270–71, 319,
350–52 323, 335–36, 358, 373, 389
O’Hara, John, 331 Imaginary Portraits, 211
Old Cumberland Beggar, The on Madame Bovary, 154
(Wordsworth), 315 Marius the Epicurean, 211, 264
“Old Man at the Bridge” (Hemingway), The Renaissance, 182, 191, 229–30,
330 234
Old Man and the Sea, The (Hemingway), Paulson, Ronald, 49
336–38 Pawel, Ernst, 283, 291
Omoo (Melville), 357 Percy, Walker, 446
“On the Art of Fiction” (Cather), 236 Lancelot, 426–28, 430
One Hundred Years of Solitude The Last Gentleman, 426
(Márquez), 500–4 Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help
O’Neill, Eugene, 351–52, 434 Book, 427
“Open Boat, The” (Crane, S.), 245 Love in the Ruins, 426–27
580 INDEX

The Moviegoer, 426–32 374–75, 377


The Second Coming, 426–28, 432 Prague Orgy, The (Roth), 524–26
Père Goriot (Balzac) Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 112, 388
Vautrin in, 87–90 Price, Martin
Perelman, S.J. on Anna Karenina, 168
“A Farewell to Omsk,” 155 on Conrad, 217
Persuasion (Austen), 53, 62–71, 141 on Defoe, 3, 6
Peters, F.E. on Dickens, 95
The Harvest of Hellenism, 254 on Fielding, 28–29, 32
Pickwick Papers (Dickens), 97 Forms of Life, 143
Pierre (Melville), 480 on Gulliver’s Travels, 17–18
Pike, Burton, 259 on Richardson, 23, 26
Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 4, 44 on Sterne, 34, 36
Pincher Martin (Golding), 399 Price of the Ticket, The (Baldwin), 487,
Place to Come To, A (Warren), 382 489–90
Plague, The (Camus), 404–7, 463 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 52, 59, 62,
Plato, 135, 389, 538 69, 112
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Elizabeth Bennett in, 53–56, 63–66,
Literary Imagination (Morrison), 518 141
Plimpton, George, 337, 478 Princess Casamassima (James), 104
Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence), 301, Prisoner of Zenda, The (Hope), 374
356 Pritchett, V.S., 364
Poe, Edgar Allen, 172, 334, 395, 557 “Problem of Our Laws, The” (Kafka),
“Poems of Our Climate, The” 284–85, 293
(Stevens), 193 Professor The (Brontë, C.), 125
Poirier, Richard, 477, 479–80, 550 Professor of Desire, The (Roth), 526
Politzer, Heinz, 279 Professor’s House, The (Cather), 235–37
Pope, Alexander, 28, 32–34 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley, P.), 77,
Popper, Karl, 492 79–81, 197
Porcher, Frances, 205–6 Protestant, 482, 491
Portable Faulkner, The (Cowley), 318 dissent, 7, 9
Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 524–25, fundamentalists, 431
528–31 sensibility, 52, 294
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A will, xviii–xix, 27, 53, 56–57, 59–61,
(Joyce), 269–71 65–67, 69, 71, 126, 138, 198, 340
Portrait of a Lady, The (James), xviii, 28, Proust (Beckett), 389
92, 107, 169, 192 Proust, Marcel, xvii, 1, 96
Isabel Archer in, 91, 126, 141, 150, influences of, 22, 25, 89, 152, 251,
198, 201–3, 221, 250 259, 279, 340–41, 344, 391, 441,
influence of, 105, 220, 373 446, 495
Possessed, The (Dostoevsky), 157 influences on, 154, 173, 387
Pot-Bouille (Zola), 171 Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne), 10
Pottle, Frederick A., 81, 222 Puig, Manuel, 501
Poulet, Georges, 174 Pynchon, Thomas, 351, 476
Pound, Ezra, 236, 263, 328 The Crying of Lot 49, xvii, 169, 192,
Power and the Glory, The (Greene), 328, 353, 454, 477, 501, 505,
INDEX 581

525, 529, 533, 542, 545, 547–48 Sir Charles Grandison, 51


Gravity’s Rainbow, 353, 365–66, “Rider Haggard’s Secret” (Greene),
412–14, 424, 502, 506, 525, 529, 372–73
532, 544–45, 547–56 Riesman, David, 492
influence, 38, 329, 445, 481, 540 Rise of the Novel, The (Watt), 29, 51–52
Mason & Dixon, xviii, 453, 529, 532, Robb, Graham, 88
544, 547, 556 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 3–6
Robinson, Douglas, 412
Quiet American, The (Greene), 374 Romanticism
forms of, xvii–xviii, 66–67, 78–80,
Raban, Jonathan, 452 82, 84–85, 97, 125, 128–30,
Rabelais, Francois, 1, 37, 88, 95–97 133–35, 153, 177, 185, 199, 204,
Racine, 1 217–18, 222, 226–27, 237, 262,
Raffel, Burton, 88 267, 271, 313, 423, 461, 505,
Rainbow, The (Lawrence), 125, 174, 519, 540, 542, 544–46, 554
265, 295, 298–301, 434 Romola (Eliot, G.), 141, 480
Rambler The (Johnson, S.), 52, 58, 70 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 56, 267
Rasselas (Johnson, S.), 52 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 132–33, 206
Reading Myself and Others (Roth), 528 Roth, Philip, 354, 453, 542, 557–58
Realism American Pastoral, 529, 532, 544
forms of, xvii, 153–54, 172, 221, The Anatomy Lesson, 524, 526–28
224–25, 248, 445, 456 The Breast, 526, 529
Recognitions, The (Gaddis), 452–54, 545 The Counterlife, 529
Red Badge of Courage, The (Crane, S.), The Ghost Writer, 524–28
245–48 The Great American Novel, 526, 529
Red and the Black, The (Stendhal), 72–76 The Human Stain, 529
Reflections in a Golden Eye (McCullers), I Married a Communist, 529
433, 436 Letting Go, 529
“Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and My Life As a Man, 524, 529
The True Way” (Brod), 273 Operation Shylock, 529
Reif, Philip, 295 Our Gang, 526, 529
Renaissance, The (Pater), 182, 191, Portnoy’s Complaint, 524–25, 528–31
229–30, 234 The Prague Orgy, 524–26
Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 318 The Professor of Desire, 526
“Resolution and Independence” Reading Myself and Others, 528
(Wordsworth), 139 Sabbath’s Theater, xviii, 169, 529–32,
Retaliation (Goldsmith), 44 544
Return of the Native, The (Hardy), 147, When She Was Good, 529
175, 181–84, 190–91 Zuckerman Bound, 524–29, 532, 544,
Rêve, Le (Zola), 171 548
Revolt of Islam, The (Shelley), 147, 174 Zuckerman Unbound, 524–28
Richardson, Samuel, 29, 38, 48, 57, Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 23, 33, 401
307, 423 Ruined Cottage, The (Wordsworth), 147,
Clarissa, xvii, xix, 22–28, 52–53, 388, 434
55–56, 59, 63, 65–66, 107, 126, Ruskin, John, 107, 211, 364
138, 177, 192, 198, 268 influences of, 94, 111, 139–40, 199,
582 INDEX

251, 270, 336, 389, 422, 441 influences of, 173, 176, 187, 189–90,
madness, 144 208–9, 295, 387–89
Ryle, Gilbert, 10 Will to Live, 163–65, 173, 187,
189–90, 224, 388
Sabbath’s Theater (Roth), xviii, 169, The World as Will and Representation,
529–32, 544 76, 173, 387
Saint-Beuve, Charles Augustin, xv Schorer, Mark, 365
Salammbô (Mailer), 477 Scott, Walter, 59, 88, 133, 203, 263
Sale, William M., 22, 383 Scribner, Charles, 329, 478
Salinger, J.D. Second Coming, The (Percy), 426–28,
The Catcher in the Rye, 244 432
Samson Agonistes (Milton), 127 Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 149, 213,
Sanctuary (Faulkner), 314, 319–22, 328, 216, 320
353, 516 Seize the Day (Bellow), 418
Sanditon (Austen), 67 Selected Poems (Warren), 380–81
Saramago, José Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 62, 64,
All the Names, 462–63 143
Baltasar and Blimunda, 455–59, Sensibar, Judith L., 314
461–62 Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 40
Blindness, 462–63, 474 Shadows on the Rock (Cather), 235
The Cave, 455, 463 Shakespeare, William, 89, 241, 243
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, All’s Well That Ends Well, 47, 529
455, 461–75 As You Like It, 46–47, 64–65
The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Henry IV, 159
461–63 influences of, xviii, 1–2, 22, 28–29,
Journey to Portugal, 462 41, 51, 64–65, 91, 93, 95–97,
The Siege of Libson, 474 101, 103–4, 140, 150, 160–62,
The Stone Raft, 459–62 189, 191, 246, 259, 266–67, 273,
The Tale of the Unknown Island, 474 300, 323, 389, 404, 440–42, 444,
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 446, 453, 471, 473, 484, 503,
458–59, 461–62 518–19, 529–30, 532–33,
Saroyan, William 538–39, 545, 558
The Human Comedy, 89 King Lear, 118, 466
Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 15, 282 Macbeth, 282
Sartre, Jean Paul, 153, 401, 445, 451 Measure for Measure, 529
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), xviii, Othello, 214, 536
150, 169, 192, 198, 223 Troilus and Cressida, 199, 529
Dimmesdale in, 92, 202–3 Shaw, George Bernard, 103–4, 107
Hester Prynne in, xix, 91–92, 202–3 She (Haggard), 374
Schlemiel As Modern Hero, The (Wisse), Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
409 Frankenstein, 77–86, 134
Scholem, Gershom Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 57, 112, 126,
on Kafka, 272, 275, 277, 284, 293 364, 477
The Messianic Idea in Judaism, double of self, 78
353–54, 359 The Dynasts, 173
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 126, 128 Epipsychidion, 174
INDEX 583

“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” 81 Sportsman’s Sketchbook, A (Turgenev),


influences of, 173–74, 183, 185, 238
187–88, 259, 262, 294, 435, 510 Staves, Susan, 49
“Mont Blanc,” 81 Steinbeck, John, 302
Prometheus Unbound, 77, 79–81, 197 death, 347
The Revolt of Islam, 147, 174 East of Eden, 347
The Triumph of Life, 434 The Grapes of Wrath, 347–52
She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), In Dubious Battle, 347
43–44, 46–47 Of Mice and Men, 347, 350–52
Shirley (Brontë, C.), 125, 130 Stein, Gertrude, 476
Shooting an Elephant (Orwell), 369 Stendhal, 1, 63, 75, 171, 246
Siddhartha (Hesse), 240 The Charterhouse of Parma, 75
Siege of Libson, The (Saramago), 474 influences of, 246, 344, 478
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe influences on, xviii
(Eliot, G.), 141, 147–49 The Red and the Black, 72–76
Sinclair, Upton Stephen, James Fitzjames, 97–98
The Jungle, 242–44 Steppenwolf (Hesse), 240
Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson), 51 Sterne, Laurence, 38, 339
Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 243, 352, 395 A Sentimental Journey, 40
“Sleepers, The “ (Whitman), 206 Tristram Shandy, 33–37, 244
Smith, Carl S., 242 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 142, 177,
Smollett, Tobias, 28, 49, 104 231, 372, 375, 464
The Adventures of Roderick Random, Kidnapped, 374
59 Treasure Island, 374
death, 38 Weir of Hermiston, 374
Humphry Clinker, 38–42 Stevens, Wallace, 33, 92, 209, 398
Snow, C.P., 119 “The Auroras of Autumn,” 226,
Socrates, 449 332, 544, 548
“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in The Comedian as the Letter C, 236
Southern Fiction” (O’Connor), 498–99 death, 384
Song of Myself (Whitman), 169, 205, influences of, 230, 241, 369, 480,
271, 420, 477, 546, 559–60 521
Song of Solomon (Morrison), 517–21, influences on, 263, 328–29, 331,
523 334, 350
Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), 145, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, 501
295–98 An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,
Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 305, 501
352–53, 477, 529 “The Poems of Our Climate,” 193
family romance in, 313, 319 Stone Raft, The (Saramago), 459–62
fear of mortality in, 317–18 Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life, A
narrative, 314–15, 322, 324, 328 (Burgess), 438
Spark, Muriel, 78 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 144, 157
Spenser, Edmund, 304 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 364, 367
Splendors and Miseries of the Courtesans Stranger, The (Camus), 401–4, 407
(Balzac), 90 Strauss, Leo, 276
Spoils of Poynton The (James), 211 Study of Thomas Hardy, A (Lawrence),
584 INDEX

174–75, 179–80, 188–89 Tess in, 126, 184–88, 191


Sula (Morrison), 515–16, 521 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 52,
Sun Also Rises The (Hemingway), 169, 129, 139
236, 477, 521 on Gulliver’s Travels, 17
influence of, 212, 328, 353, 481 Vanity Fair, 127, 221–22
narrative, 329–31, 334, 337–38, Their Eyes Were Watching God
348–49 (Hurston), 306–10
parataxis, 332–33 Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 171–72
Suttree (McCarthy), 538, 544 Thibaudet, Albert, 153
Svevo, Italo Third Man, The (Greene), 374
Confessions of Zeno, 422 Thirty-Nine Steps, The (Buchan), 374
Swift, Jonathan, 32, 364, 442 This Gun for Hire (Greene), 374–77
The Battle of the Books, 10 Thomas, Dylan, 442
Gulliver’s Travels, 14–21, 369, 400 Thoreau, Henry David, 193, 303–4,
irony and satire, 11, 13, 16–19, 21, 308, 329, 545
34, 39–40, 95, 387, 400, 457 Walden, 92
A Tale of a Tub, 10–15, 21, 387 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll), 340
Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 133, Tillotson, Geoffrey, 112
206 To Autumn (Keats), 315, 322
To Have and Have Not (Hemingway),
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 159–60 330
Tale of Margaret, The (Wordsworth), To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 265–68
315 Tolkien, J.R., 506, 513
Tale of a Tub, A (Swift), 10–15, 21, 387 The Lord of the Rings, 514
Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 97–103, Tolstoy, Leo, 89, 137, 215
404 Anna Karenina, 76, 163–68, 202
Tale of the Unknown Island, The influences of, 63, 93, 145, 174, 189,
(Saramago), 474 246, 300, 329, 334, 478, 525, 545
Tan, Amy influences on, 157, 173, 387
The Joy Luck Club, 559–60 styles of, 159, 161
Tanner, Tony, 544–45 War and Peace, 158, 163
Tate, Allen, 6, 381 Tombs of Atuan, The (Le Guin), 506
Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline, 242 Tom Jones (Fielding), 28–31
Tave, Stuart M., 55, 57, 63–65, 67–68 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 159–60, 229
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Brontë, A.), Tourneur, Cyril, 375
125 The Atheist’s Tragedy, 319
Tenants, The (Malamud), 408–11 Transcendentalism, 205, 540, 544, 546
Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald), 150, Traveller, The (Goldsmith), 44
311–12 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 374
Tennyson, Alfred, 112 Trial, The (Kafka), 19, 290–93
Maud, 111 Trilling, Lionel, 236
Terras, Victor on 1984, 363, 365, 369
A Karamazov Companion, 158 on Austen, 55–57
Terre, La (Zola), 171 on Dreiser, 479
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), 175, on Forster, 249, 253
181 on Kipling, 228
INDEX 585

on Lolita, 340 Villette (Brontë, C.), 125, 130


Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 33–37, 244 Violent Bear It Away, The (O’Connor),
Triumph of Life, The (Shelley), 434 169, 491–95
Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 199, Virgil, 246
529 Voltaire, 88
Trollope, Anthony, 139 Candide, 401, 407
Barchester Towers, 119–24 Zadig, 401, 407
influences of, 121 Voyage to Arcturus (Lindsay), 506
The Warden, 119
Turgenev, Ivan, 173, 329–30, 387 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 389–90
Fathers and Sons, 158 Walden (Thoreau), 92
A Sportsman’s Sketchbook, 238 Wallace, Edgar
Twain, Mark, xiv, 41, 192, 313, 322, The Four Just Men, 374
330, 424 Warden, The (Trollope), 119
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, xviii, War and Peace (Tolstoy), 158, 163
91–92, 169–70, 230–31, 233, “War is Kind” (Crane, S.), 245
327, 400, 480, 521 Warren, Robert Penn, 223
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 230 All the King’s Men, 382–86
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Altitudes and Extensions, 381
Court, 480 At Heaven’s Gate, 382
influences of, 327–28 Band of Angels, 382
The Mysterious Stranger, 542 Being Here, 381
romance forms of, xvii–xviii on Hemingway, 328, 330
Typee (Melville), 357 influences on, xviii, 192, 319, 334,
380–85
Ulysses (Joyce), xvii, 28, 64, 104, 107, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr,
250, 305, 525 381
influence on, 269–70, 317–18, 329, Night Rider, 381–82
387, 438–42, 444, 453 A Place to Come To, 382
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 364, 367 Selected Poems, 380–81
Under the Net (Murdoch), 449 World Enough and Time, 223,
Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 213, 216 382–83
Underworld (DeLillo), 169, 454, 529, Waste Land, The (Eliot, T.S.), 235, 314,
532 320, 453, 495
narrative of, xviii, 540–42, 544–46 Watt (Beckett), 387–88, 390, 438
Updike, John, 334, 446, 541 Watt, Ian
on Austen, 51–52
Valèry, Paul, xv on Conrad, 211, 217
Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 127, 221–22 on Defoe, 3, 22
Vechten, Carl Van, 309 on Fielding, 29
Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith), 38, on Richardson, 22, 26
43, 44–46 The Rise of the Novel, 29, 51
Victim, The (Bellow), 418 Waugh, Evelyn, 123, 374
Victory (Conrad), 213, 217, 265, 324 Decline and Fall, 39
Vidal, Gore, 126 A Handful of Dust, 39
Vile Bodies (Waugh), 39 Vile Bodies, 39
586 INDEX

Waves, The (Woolf), 266 477, 546, 559–60


Webster, John, 375, 384 “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
The Duchess of Malfi, 377 Bloom’d,” 206, 209, 320
The White Devil, 319, 323, 377, 379 Why Are We In Vietnam? (Mailer), 477,
Weil, Simone, 450, 494 480–81
Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson), 374 Wilde, Oscar, xiv, 104, 123, 206, 229,
Well-Beloved, The (Hardy), 188 263, 331, 358, 367, 462, 503
Wells, H.G., 236, 366 Wild Palms, The (Faulkner), 314
West, Nathanael, 351, 362, 493, 524 Wilkins, Sophie, 259
A Cool Million, 305, 353, 360–61, Williams, Raymond, 365–66
366, 494 Williams, William Carlos, 328
The Day of the Locust, 353, 360 Wimsatt, William, K., 237
death, 353, 453 Wind in the Willows, The (Grahame),
The Dream Life of Balso Snell, 353, 243, 370
360, 526–27 Wings of the Dove, The (James), 105,
Miss Lonleyhearts, 169, 192, 305, 192, 198, 373
328–29, 353–62, 365, 412, 477, Winner Takes Nothing (Hemingway),
492, 495, 525, 542, 548 331
Weyman, Stanley, 372 Wise Blood (O’Connor), 494–95
Wharton, Edith, xix, 92, 235 Wisse, Ruth R.
Age of Innocence, 192, 220–21, 227 The Schlemiel As Modern Hero, 409
A Backward Glance, 220 Wolfe, Thomas, 236, 243, 313, 338
The Custom of the Country, 220–23 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 77
death, 220 Women and Angels (Brodkey), 354
Ethan Frome, 223–27 Women in Love (Lawrence), 107, 125,
The House of Mirth, 220 174, 265, 295–301
influences on, 220–21, 224–27 Woodlanders, The (Hardy), 190, 237
What Maisie Knew (James), 211 Wood, Michael, 516
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Woolf, Virginia, xviii–xix, 4, 23, 58,
Bloom’d” (Whitman), 206, 209, 320 191, 522
When She Was Good (Roth), 529 Between the Acts, 267–68
White Devil, The (Webster), 319, 323, death, 262
377, 379 influences on, 262–67
“White Knight’s Ballad” (Carroll), 139 “The Leaning Tower,” 262–63
White Noise (DeLillo), 454, 540–44 Mrs. Dalloway, 61, 263–65, 523
Whitman, Walt, xiv, 113, 170, 241, 295, A Room of One’s Own, 56, 267
303, 347, 350, 423, 442 To the Lighthouse, 265–68
Drum-Taps, 93 The Waves, 266
influences of, 297, 309–10, 328–29, Word Child, A (Murdoch), 445
331–32, 334, 354, 361, 419, 430, Wordsworth, William, 23, 83, 150, 423
545, 557 The Borderers, 126
influences on, 173, 192–93, 204–9 The Excursion, 57, 147
Leaves of Grass, xviii, 92, 169, 205, imagination, 57–58
231 influences of, 66–68, 70–71, 140,
“The Sleepers,” 206 195, 237, 270, 314–15, 322–23
Song of Myself, 169, 205, 271, 420, Michael, 315
INDEX 587

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality Yeats, William Butler, 191, 197, 330,


from Recollections of Earliest 358
Childhood,” 68 influences of, 188–89, 229, 249,
The Old Cumberland Beggar, 262–63, 514, 550
315 Yoder, Jon A., 242
The Prelude, 112, 388 “Youth” (Conrad), 210
“Resolution and Independence,”
139 Zabel, M.D., 174
The Ruined Cottage, 147, 388, 434 Zadig (Voltaire), 401, 407
The Tale of Margaret, 315 Zola, Émile, 89, 243
World as Will and Representation, The La Bête humaine, 171
(Schopenhauer), 76, 173, 387 death, 171
World Enough and Time (Warren), 223, Le Débâcle, 171
382–83 Le Docteur Pascal, 171
Wright, Richard, 518 Germinal, 171
Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and influences of, 248
Youth, 394, 396–98 influences on, 171–73, 387
influences on, 393–95, L’Assommoir, 171
397–98 Nana, 171
Native Son, 393–96 Pot-Bouille, 171
Wuthering Heights (Brontë, E.), 67, Le Rêve, 171
125–26, 129–36 La Terre, 171
Wyatt, David M., 313 Thérèse Raquin, 171–72
Zola: A Life (Brown), 171–72
Yalden, Thomas, xv Zuckerman Bound (Roth), 524–29, 532,
Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The 544, 548
(Saramago), 458–59, 461–62 Zuckerman Unbound (Roth), 524–28
About the Author

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale


University. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelley’s
Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse
(1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion
(1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of
Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets
forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships
between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books
include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National
Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One
Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003),
and Where Shall Wisdom be Found (2004). In 1999, Professor Bloom
received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold
Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International
Prize.

588

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